the light we cannot see

Anne Casey
(Salmon Poetry, 2021; pbk, €12.00)

Anne Casey’s third poetry collection is a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of deeply personal grief that yet, somehow, leans always a little towards the light. Touching the poet’s own experiences of mothering young boys in the face of wide-spread environmental crisis, on the turmoil and isolation of Covid-19, and on losing her parents, the light we cannot see is one of those rare collections that uses language as a prism through which you, I, we, see the living world anew.  

Though drawn from her own experiences, Casey’s remarkable work reaches far beyond the poet's immediate world; it recreates the experience of perceiving multiple viewpoints. Meanings shift across the page; the pain of personal loss melds with the collective despair felt as we face the effects of climate change. She makes the latter less abstract and intangible, its immediacy brought to the heart. At the same time, while the light we cannot see is a keening for what we have lost and what we may lose, Casey’s attention captures the exquisite and multifaceted beauty of the living world now. 

A red carnation, sitting on a table in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, becomes a ‘seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves⁠—a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution’(i). In the same way, each line, each poem, and the collection as a whole, give multiple concurrent perspectives in depth and detail. Words and white space reflect the multiplicity of possible responses to the key themes, as well as refracting the words of others. ‘On Monday, i ate three strawberries, a pear, a palmful of sunflower seeds & one nicely ripe banana’   will be instantly recognisable to many as a play on Eric Carle’s childhood classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The palmful of seeds in the title sets you in the human world. The ‘i’ of the poem is both you and the poet, and  you find yourself salivating, making a pouch, your ‘cells melding’. The visceral descriptions take hold of your body as your mind melds with that of the caterpillar’s and you feel a physical lurch as your perspective is transferred: ‘… i am in here now, warm/ & cushioned from outside sounds’. 

The physicality of these reactions stems from the way the words swell and wane across the page. These poems are palpable. The poet’s world swells unexpectedly in ‘All the beautiful outcasts’  with the sight of foxes playing in a sylvan slice of land; your own lungs fill with the spill of images. But, as awareness of impending loss dawns, words empty from the page, and your lungs are emptied by the force of the poet’s grief – it becomes your own. ‘Past the slip’ ’ recreates grief’s trickery: each pause on the page replicates ‘the jolt/ of thoughts to call/ you’. You are knocked off balance as the poet is knocked off balance, reshaped by each wave of remembrance that renews loss.

Casey is masterful in her use of enjambment to this end. White space functions as much as the words and guides you through the shifting meanings, twisting or adding to your perspective as you move through each poem. The first stanza of 'Prayer-fish' ends with a ‘splay of dying/ light on the horizon’. Read one way, the splay of dying belongs to the poem’s subject but suggests that there is light still to be found; read another way, it is that light on the horizon that is dying. In ‘Exiled’, Casey uses the same technique to represent our dual ways of living with climate change: 

this microscopic
Armageddon; still to be human
is to persist
even at this
infernal pass,
we will stir
the will to lean into the light

Form and space around the words might leave each statement whole but also presents⁠—simultaneously⁠— the obverse implications that pivot on the central word ‘persist’. The effects of climate change are a situation of our own making that we continue to persist with. And yet that same persistence might also save life on this planet, giving us the strength to ‘lean into the light’ and to find a way through the ‘infernal pass’. 

Despite the multiple perspectives, these poems are not entirely ambiguous. They do not sit on the fence, but rather circle internal and external landscapes, responding to life. Each subject is seen in disbelief, grief, and anger. Yet woven throughout is an almost evanescent – nevertheless persistent – thread of resilience. The different readings slither and slide in and around you. Casey portrays the inherent contradictions of hope and despair in living each day in a world that appears to be dying. She writes in ‘Suggestions for living, a cento’, composed using fragments of Jessie Lendennie’s poetry:

Lay still, the sounds heard
the beginning of comfort; feel
the sea on the wind, the fall-falling
of the wave riding the horizon

You find yourself riding the current of words and space, always falling and always held. You, I, we, are rocked and reshaped by the darkness and by the light we cannot see, yet know – hope – wish – fight – to be there.

The Waves, a cento(ii)
After Anne Casey

-in to this abyss
of our own
creation - how we had

Armageddon; still to be human
is to persist

to[o] dark to light? Reflecting on Earth:
perspective at once vivid and spectral;

would be if no longer living
on in me — the sharp shock of

this grand, fine day.

pure compassion
runs to no human timeline

leaves 
sticks earth desert -ified

as you had been

until one day when the
world had settled
back on its axis 
and the time is right to 

muddle through under
a shifting light

(i) Virginia Woolf, The Waves, p. 75

(ii) This cento is composed by the reviewer entirely of lines and line segments from the light we cannot see (Salmon Poetry 2021) by Anne Casey