Elemental Skin, book of Irish poetry from Catherine Ronan
review by Jeff Kaliss, Poetry Editor
I wait for Catherine Ronan to show up, crazy-curled and wickedly grinning, comically blurred by her webcam, towards the end of the 75-minute Thursday Lime Square Poetry open mic sessions, where she serves as sort of a psychic digestif of poitín*. Though they gird the globe in online Zooms, the sessions are based in Ireland, in Limerick and Cork.
Poet Catherine lives near the latter lovely location, and she reads in what could be a hyena brogue, if hyenas had the power to transfix their prey with the power of their howl. But the weirding is every bit as much in the wording. So I’m glad to have the words laid out here in the Elemental Skin collection, on holiday from their creator’s voice.
Catherine lives large through her poetry, and invites us to join her, perhaps to live like her, or at least to try to. Look at her loving in these fragments from her verse, how she loves places in “Red and White Bones”:
Love outside City Hall ignites fifty years.
Vicarstown Inn turns my angel upside down. . .
Bodega Jazz sweats through white bricks.
Songs rise from the Marsh of ancient Cork.
She loves her ethnic spiritualism’s take on her nation’s adopted faith, celebrated in “Brigid”:
Our Mary of the Gael,
we tie magic ribbons and rags
to your holy wish trees,
sing songs over ancient rivers.
She loves the cosmos up above, depicted in “Gougane Barra”:
Just after midnight
on the outskirts of city,
the moon gave birth
to an everlasting sun.
And she loves what beckons us beyond love and life. In “Ghosts”:
Ignoring every slippery dark stone, ghosts lick one small hair
on gooseberries to feel real. I know you more than every tick turns
broken-handed time and your eyes confess a second skin.
Reread that last stanza, and you’ll find yourself traversing all kinds of elements that you wouldn’t find keeping company in our tamed quotidian routines, in the sober polemical poetry we often have to sit through. You wouldn’t find ghosts licking berries or eyes confessing skin there, so you need Catherine sailing you to these New Worlds. She discovers for you metaphors that are more meta, psychedelic similes.
But like many of Ireland’s best poets, novelists, playwrights, and songwriters, Catherine keeps her grip on the craft of storytelling. She stays true to how life moves us, and even more truly true to her incarnation as a sassy and lyrical Corkonian whom we’re lucky to be getting to know. Get this book!
*Poiton, or poteen, is a traditional Irish distilled beverage, formerly known as “Irish Moonshine.”
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Elemental Skin, Catherine Ronan, Revival Press, 2023 is available from: https://limerickwriterscentre.com/product-category/revival-press/
Irish poet Catherine Ronan.