Guest Review: Unsafe by Geraldine O’Kane

Last month I handed in my dissertation for a PhD in Earth Sciences and returned to university to pursue an MA in poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. This is a completely new challenge for me, having rarely attended humanities lectures to date. My current reading list spans five centuries, taking in Shakespeare’s Sonnets right through to cutting edge contemporary free verse. I often struggle to read a book of poetry in a single sitting. I found that this was not the case for Geraldine O’Kane’s Unsafe.

Geraldine O’Kane is a poet, creative writing facilitator and mental health advocate. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies, journals and zines in Ireland, the UK and the US, as well as appearing in Arlen House’s anthology of new women’s poetry from Ireland, Washing Windows? Irish Women Write Poetry. She is one half of Poetry NI, a multimedia platform offering opportunities and resources for poets in Northern Ireland. Her micro-poetry pamphlet Quick Succession was published by Pen Points Press in 2014.

Unsafe’s breadth in form and line length, as well as its potent and extensive suite of imagery, encouraged me to read it in a single 90-minute sitting and comb through it with pencil in hand. All of these devices are used to bear witness to suffering presented in many different forms. What I find most impressive is the ease with which O’Kane assumes the role of the poet as witness. Different poetic voices convey variable pain and loss, in an interconnected way between poems, that sustains both my reflection and attention as a reader. These are balanced against childhood memories, moments of tenderness and meditations on the writing process, as well as optimism for the future.

It is worth mentioning at this stage that some of the suffering presented in Unsafe is intense, referencing the dissolution of families, as well as the threat of violence. These themes assume several forms in different poems.

One of the opening poems of the collection, ‘While I Remember’, closes with the speaker’s family memory rooted in sensory imagery. ‘Gooseberry jam is Granny in a jar; /when I need faith, I open the lid,/ breathe her in.’ The image, which conjures up an atmosphere of safety, is in contrast to the allusion to family dissolution that precedes it.

Similarly, in ‘When Memories Awaken a Fire’, O’Kane also evokes memories from the speaker’s family home using judicious line breaks, ‘instead I curled up habitually, /used my toilet roll telescope/ to look out on Lough Neagh, /silent keeper of its fishermen.’

Such memories are balanced with an atmosphere of disruption and upset, which becomes increasingly emergent with each successive poem, as in ‘Therapy’, which sets a scene involving paramedics, where ‘the uniformed laughter of the bus stop/turns caustic in her ears’. Again, in ‘This Morning’, as the speaker says goodbye to a loved one before leaving for a flight, ‘I realise if I were never to see you again, / this image would never hold up.’ This implied potential for loss resonates with a later poem, ‘Statistician’, where, driving in icy conditions, the subject of the poem is ‘calculating stop distance, probable outcomes’.

O’Kane approaches death and loss in a variety of ways. ‘Then We Were Four’ is an elegy to a lost sibling, ‘You pop up in daydreams…looking like/ all three of us’. In poems such as ‘Deadly Games’ and ‘Left for Dead’, moments leading up to death, or with the potential for death, are written in language that is dispassionate relative to other poems. In the wake of the events presented, the response elicited in the reader is anything but dispassionate, and ranges from shock through to empathy.

One of my favourite poems in Unsafe is ‘On Writing’, an anaphoric list poem that begins each stanza addressed to ‘You’. One stanza that resonated with me reads,

‘You are festering in my gut, /spluttering out from internal places, / pulling the hearth of me with you’, and that chimes with a later verse, ‘You are what happens; / when I martyr myself / on today’s tabula rasa’.

For me, O’Kane captures both the reckoning with and reflection on one’s lived experience in the image of ‘the hearth of me’ required by writing which, in the later stanza, takes place ‘on today’s tabula rasa’ (clean slate). I take this clean slate to be cathartic, to bring a sense of resolution, at least in part. Similarly, ‘Weekday Poem’, also a list poem, presents the weekly life cycle entailed in writing and revising a poem, where Monday’s poem is ‘slow to rise’ and by Sunday, ‘wants to stay up late, /sucking at the sap of enjoyment’.

O’Kane’s turn of phrase is at its finest in ‘Object’. I read it as an uplifting address to women and a rebuttal to historical patriarchy. There is a movement from the end of the first stanza, ‘We grew, iridescent in their adoration —’ to an entreaty in the second stanza to ‘Abandon your halos, slip into a cotton dress, / feel confident in your own fleshy chic.’

It is hard to do justice to Unsafe in a short article. As previously mentioned, O’Kane bears witness to loss and suffering, at the same time as she carves out a space for moments of clarity and nuanced observations of the everyday in the midst of that same suffering. An example of this is in ‘Impeccable’, a reflection on close relationships: ‘Do the boundaries/ of friendship lie within the ease of their conversations?’ Similarly, in ‘Devotions’, in the middle of illness and caring for loved ones, the speaker reflects: ‘I found in me a devotion I didn’t know I was capable of, for this body who asked nothing of mine in return’. One lesson I have taken away from Unsafe, as a new poet, is the possibility of presenting pain and beauty in a congruent way — where, in a selection of poems that contain painful gravity, there is always room to be found for ‘a single speck of glitter’, as in ‘Venus in my Living Room’, ‘twirling, visible and wondrous.’

Eoghan Totten grew up in Newcastle, County Down and began reading and writing poetry in his spare time as a visiting student researcher at The University of California, Berkeley, in 2014. A recently completed PhD student in Geophysics, he has returned to university to pursue an MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. His most recently published poem is to appear in Local Wonders. He is a marathon-running enthusiast and trains in his spare time. You can find him on Twitter @totten93

Media

Excerpt from Unsafe on Salmon Poetry

Interview in the Honest Ulsterman

Praise for Unsafe

As a first collection Unsafe demonstrates the very considerable skills and talents of an up and coming poet who can employ the micro form and more expansive free verse form to equal effect. This poet can handle sensitive narrative, evoke memories, excavate a relationship, intimate the depth of mental pain, make incisive observations, or present the crux of a situation with the economy of a haiku —

The epicentre

of the divorce,

I was their shrapnel. (“While I Remember”)

Most of these poems appear to have grown out of lived experience and close attention, addressing themes such as childhood vulnerability, the fragile balance of relationships, domestic violence, loss and what remains and sustains. What gives these essentially domestic encounters enduring significance is their blend of the particular and the psychological. Geraldine O’Kane brings a concentration of awareness to her carefully weighed and weighted poetry: a distillation that is frank, tender and humane.

Ruth Carr

I started reading Unsafe and found I couldn’t stop. The honesty, the clear-eyed empathy in these poems is compelling. This is a collection of neatly crafted lyrics depicting the messy moments that make us who we are; some are funny, some shocking. All resonate deeply. Unsafe is a generous and haunting debut.

Susan Millar DuMars

“There is warmth and light, darkness and danger in these poems. O’Kane drops anchor into the pedestrian moments of the everyday and creates a unique mosaic of domestic vignettes that often take us by surprise.”

Mel McMahon

Raw and emotive, O’Kane’s work is driven by the power of memory, channelling both nostalgia and melancholy with pinpoint accuracy. These distilled micropoems and lyrically complex lengthier pieces are vivid and ultimately rewarding. A brave and uncompromising debut.

Ross Thompson

Geraldine’s poems tell of memories that are silently screaming, here they have found a voice where she is urgently reporting back as a witness. She speaks of trauma and the resilience that comes over time. She is Hitting to Hurt, I feel in an effort to heal us; she says “This is the room where I last saw you.” and she certainly sees us, she unflinchingly looks to meet your eye and then devastates us with all it means to be utterly human.

Stephen James Smith