Third Book, Third Charm
Sky Thick with Fireflies is Ethna McKiernan’s most recent collection, brought out in 2012 by Salmon Poetry (County Clare, Ireland), also the publisher of her second collection, The One Who Swears You Can’t Start Over, in 2002. Her first collection, Caravan (1989) – as with her more recent volumes – earned many favorable reviews, and so it has been since then, nary a clunker in the bunch.
McKiernan was born the fifth of nine children in New York City, in late 1951. Her father was a professor of English, specializing in Irish literature, and her mother a schoolteacher when she wasn’t at home rearing children. The future poet became a mother to three sons and a businesswoman. She then earned a MFA degree in her forties because she “needed to put poetry smack into the middle” of her life again, as she later remarked during a radio interview.
For the last several years in Minneapolis, she has been an outreach worker with the homeless, from which have come images of starkness and great resolve. In other words, she’s not been hedged in by the groves of academe, but her love for her Irish heritage, including memories of her professor father, produced this sonnet –
THE SCHOLAR IN THE PLAYROOM
My father’s head was propped up in his hands.
Around him chaos swirled; the cello played
off-key in practice, someone vacuumed sand
we’d tracked in from the beach. I was amazed
that he could concentrate through all this,
scoring Shakespeare’s words with yellow pen
and calmly reading as I wrestled Fergus
while the youngest blundered through the den.
For years I’ve carried my father’s image around,
the flame in the storm who loved the crazy wind
his children were despite the din of sound
he sometimes wished he could rescind.
He proved the ivory tower a myth, this anti-Lear,
who kept his children, his Cordelias near.
In the same interview in October 2009, McKiernan was also asked how she saw the poetry scene in America and in Minneapolis, where she has lived for a good number of years. She was observant and modest but realistic: “That’s a big question. What I have to compare it to is the publishing scene and reading scene in Ireland. There in the Sunday paper, the Irish Times – all its splendor – is a poem for the public consumption and reading! That doesn’t occur here. And I miss these kinds of things. Culturally I’m pointing out a difference, just because the question seems so large – and I’m not quite sure I can do it justice.”
Her affinities for many she has met along the way have brought forth poems such as “Swannanoa Afternoon” (for Eleanor Wilner), “Too Soon” (for John Engman, a poet friend who succumbed to a sudden brain aneurysm at age 47, in 1996), and other well-etched efforts, such as a spoof of Robert Bly’s lordly pronouncements, or tributes for her sons from their infancies to growing up, or her own need for love with its inevitable ordeals. Here is a tightly carved poem as one relationship was ending –
ARTIFACTS
Coming across them unexpectedly like that
after years
birch bark tendrils, translucent
as an uncoiled sigh in sleep
a sack of forest twigs breathing
forest tang before air grows factual again
small gift, first offerings
the past bursting into present tense
a shock sudden as the notes of Beethoven
crashing through the dark hallway
or the single quiet night we swam
surprised as fish inside each other
troubled
as we rubbed uncertain gills
by a presence of death in things unsung
the incense still packaged
notes from an old sonnet
shelved before done.
In reading McKiernan from book to book, especially this new volume, I’m reminded of other poets revealing both fragility and immense strength from within – Sandra McPherson, James Bertolino, Natalie Diaz, Sigrid Bergie, and Abigail Price – among a select plenitude. Ethna McKiernan’s poetry is of this high caliber.
Sky Thick with Fireflies is published by Salmon Press, 2012. Order your copy here