Dinner in the Fields

Appearing in journals for some time, Attracta Fahy's poems now find their home in Dinner in the Fields. Like the ancients, she bears an attraction for the depths and modes of spirit, our humanity among the deceased, in lyrics of moving recollection. Here we find the strict codes of rural life, turf fires, gravestone etchings, the character of fields, thmaw of slurry pits, the waves of migratory birds whose rhythms map our own instincts of homing and displacement.None of this dissolves in the treacle of nostalgia. Indeed, throughout she turns to address perils of our collective present: the sham of orthodoxy, the threats to intimacy, the border dividing possession and belonging, and the psyche's slender dominion. But in the grip of these complex and often conflicting subjects, her premises join hands with her intimations: the hope that love is never far, that death cannot cancel meaning, which is always at hand, that family is continuous with history's etchings, that the self grows concurrently in nature and family. As she writes, "hope/ moves in the soil beneath/ my feet." If soil does anything of the sort, we are lucky indeed, and fortunate to have a poet of Fahy's evocative talent to offer the beauty of it to mind. Further, it's work that should be taken to memory. -David Rigsbee