The Nowhere Birds (review)

Caitríona O'Reilly, born in Dublin in 1973, wrote her doctoral thesis at Trinity College on American literature. She is a poet of occasional sheer beauty as well as of wild disconcertions. At times, O'Reilly seems somehow distracted as she reflects on experiences in her travels (chiefly in mainland Europe), as well as on personal relationships. For O'Reilly and for the reader, nothing is static, as the fluidity of her short poem "Watermark" shows:

Among the signs that lovers' bodies give
I loved the slow uncurling of your palms
like beech-leaves making shadows over water:
how my skin was awash for days on end
with the impress of hands on a river.

In the title poem, with an explanatory epigraph that "In past centuries it was believed that/ Migrating birds would winter on the moon" O'Reilly writes with a cryptic irony that does not always entirely reveal. More and more, one grows to respect this reticence in her poems. Disconcertion roils in O'Reilly's verse, but one often finds her insights accurate to the bone, as seen in the closing lines of "After A Death":

My heart knocks
painfully in its small box
of spectacular solitude, whispering to itself, anoxic.

Jaundice results
from pathological blockage of the bile ducts.
Sclerosis. Silting. Failure of flux.

Those spidery
red veins in the yellow eye
she rolled and rolled at me, until the eye congealed,

ignorant of the sun
towards which I, a tree of veins,
an anorexic plant, still shook and leaned.

Caitríona O'Reilly is not at first an easy poet to understand, at first. Her poems ought not be skimmed but pondered, in order to absorb their sinews and tendrils. O'Reilly is a poet's poet, at the very least.