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Eileen is delighted to share in full reviews of her third poetry collection, The Stone Messenger, which has been published in the superb poetry journal Envoi, almost two years after the book first hit the shelves.
The Stone Messenger is the third collection of poetry by Eileen Carney Hulme, a poet with a distinctive and unmistakable voice. The collection focuses on loss, particularly the loss of her parents, and in a broader arena, the impact of war in a series of poems set in Sarajevo. Underlying these themes, however, is a recurrent evocation of our relation to the physical world, which while temporary and subject to change offers also beauty, joy and the possibility of transformation. One of Hulme's strengths is her celebration of everyday life, our bitter sweet existence, in imagery, sometimes elemental, sometimes domestic, and deployed in leitmotifs throughout the collection: skies and sea, bones and buttons, coffee and conversation, clouds and the colour blue.
Running through her work too, and perhaps easily overlooked, is a gentle humour which offsets some of the difficult aspects of life which she does not shrink from addressing. An example of this is to be found in Closer than Breathing, relating a chance encounter with a man on the bus to Findhorn speaking of where eternity is to be found and another is the iteration of 'dobro' in Scotland to Sarajevo:
...I know little
of the language, I know dobro
means good, a useful word ...
the weather is dobro
the food is dobro
the people are dobro
Overall, the blending of the sensuous aspects of life with an elegiac awareness is subtly and poignantly realised:
Today I walk
the Findhorn Road,
word-ghosts trip me up
cloud-fall trails
like an afterlife
this is the last road ...I walk. (Things I Never Said)
She writes with enviable clarity and directness. Sometimes it is the ordinary word that suffices without further need for embellishment. To write with apparent simplicity, paradoxically, requires a high degree of technical skill and this she has. She can be arresting and eminently quotable, as in this aphorism which encapsulates the Stone Messenger to a large degree:
'Nothing/prepares you for/not letting go.' What is evident in all her work, and what further reinforces her skill in crafting poems, is a pronounced lyrical quality which goes further than speech. Many of the poems gathered here are closer to song in effect and logic. I think this is why Hulme's poems have such a strong emotional resonance. This lyric impulse arises again and again in the collection:
My father's heart
cannot be found.
Its shadow can be seen
in the eyes of startled trout...
My father's heart cannot be found
I hold it lightly in my palm. (Leaving the Funeral Home in Enniskillen)
In this way, Hulme's work is a constant pleasure for eye and ear, a lyrical poet in the most fundamental sense of the term
Reviewed by David Mark Williams, more info here.
A further wonderful review of The Stone Messenger by the distinguished poet and academic R V Bailey is awaiting publication, here is an extract from that comprehensive and outstanding review.
'This collection is the third from Eileen Carney Hulme, and as her readers I'm sure will agree it's a welcome addition to the earlier two volumes, and perhaps the best yet.
She hijacks weather, colour, seasons, scents and senses in the service of (usually) love and (in addition, in this collection) loss. Her words continue to create moments and sensations; to offer perspectives and questions with the admirable economy that characterises her writing.
Like so many of her poems Navigate by Moonlight (extract of poem quoted) illustrates the apparent simplicity that conceals the real complexity of her poems. As in 'Guilt is Quiet' she relies on the weight of everyday words, such as 'guilt' and 'last'. This kind of saying without saying leaves the reader's mind free to participate in the poem - which, though one of the joys of reading poetry - is far from easy for a poet to manage. She pares down her poems, relies on short (often monosyllabic) words that quietly lend her work surprising force. The otiose adjectives and adverbs that so often weigh down poems are largely absent from Carney Hulme's work; she's a writer whose work is disciplined, never self-indulgent.
One of her important themes in this new collection is the impossibility of arresting the processes of time. This has been a primary preoccupation of poets for centuries, but she invests it with a freshness that convinces: the future, with its questionable details, leans over her shoulder, but lightly, disturbingly, without fuss; she makes this well-trodden poetic preoccupation her own almost by stealth.
She manages her (usually) light-hearted landscape deftly, with carefully selected signals - and not too many of them. This, too, leaves the reader free to appropriate, to explore further. And it's clear that she trusts her reader: she knows it takes two to make a poem work.
Though serious, The Stone Messenger is by no means a gloomy collection; there's too much energy in the poems for that. This collection, like her others, covers a lot of human experience without fuss, enjoyably and efficiently. Though there is the same clarity, the same grateful accessibility, the same economical craftsmanship that readers have come to expect from Carney Hulme, The Stone Messenger speaks with a new authority and assurance, the product of a truly original and increasingly experienced talent.' R V Bailey
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