Review: Sweeney as a Girl

In The Eye of the Whirlpool 
Review: Sweeney as a Girl 

Adam Buckley

Jaki McCarrick
Poetry
Daedealus Press, pp. 76
Cost: €12.50 – €20.00

When people leave our lives, relics are left behind as testaments to their existence. These relics are often possessions of loved ones, sometimes stories observed or passed down, and other times, they are us. Jaki McCarrick’s debut poetry collection Sweeney as a Girl conjures a lived-in world via these relics, whether they're rooted in the history of her life, her literary muses, or her homeland.

The first poem, the collection’s namesake, sets the tone as McCarrick dons the visage of the crazed and exiled Irish king of legend, Buile Suibhne, as armor against the struggles of the modern world. In it are the concepts that the collection most often returns to: grief, story, and the beauty of Ireland. The lines “I hate its vacuous Facebook self / I hate its plagues and smoke and mirrors” make textual reaches towards issues such as social media and the Covid-19 pandemic, which conjure themes befit the titular King as an avatar for modern sources of modern isolation (lines 5-6).

These ideas orbit around the reader, giving one the ability to reach out and catch one on the second round if it passed them by on the first. The advantage to this tidal movement of the book’s themes is that they never overwhelm. Early pieces like “Role Reversal” tackle familial grief, and the penultimate, 5-part poem, “The Architect,” shows that the thread is carried throughout the volume in spirit, but forms often vary drastically. Its segmented structure, supplemented by a quote from King Lear as its epigraph, squarely pegs it as a reference to the Bard’s 5 act plays. “Role Reversal” discusses the reflected nature of a child seeing their parent on their deathbed, how the child now must take care of the one who has taken care of them their whole life, sporting a unique form in which the second stanza is the first stanza mirrored, ending as it began, but reflected.

When McCarrick picks a literary muse, these entries typically end up being the most enjoyable to me. Not only do I enjoy art about art, but McCarrick’s take always remained personal and grounded in the collection’s themes. My absolute favorite, “Caliban’s Island,” uses allusions to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest to discuss the complexities of a relationship between an Irish woman and her British partner. The lines, “It was a working relationship. Neither he nor I could / duck or dive our differences, namely his theft / of this place, of which he’d the audacity to be frightened” see McCarrick’s history as a playwright come through as she, like in the title poem, takes on a condemned figure, this time Caliban, and conceives a mask of him, wearing his perceived monstrosity as armor (lines 1-3). What I love most about this piece is how it ties together all the themes swirling around this collection. McCarrick’s penchant for adopting literary identities manifests as a tribute to her Irish pride at the end, or death, of a relationship. If she must be a monster for living on this island, then Caliban she must be.

It pains me to say that poems about Ireland itself usually fell the most flat for me, somebody with a little bit of Irish in them. McCarrick’s language and description regarding the island’s hills and bogs and waves always proved authentic, like in pieces such as “Burnets by the Sea,” but as a non-local, I connected to character-focused works like “Home Ground,” which use Ireland and its place in history to reflect on its place in McCarrick’s life. The poem reflects on her upbringing in London, naming relics of the city like “the South Bank, St Martin’s lane, / the 98 bus, the delicious gust of air / you’d get down St. John’s Wood tube” in order to contrast the "notorious border town” in Ireland she finds herself in, “where alternative views of history can be found” (lines 2, 5-7, 14).

The secret fourth genre of poems in Sweeney as a Girl sees McCarrick as a witness, the relic left behind when birds take wing, months pass by, and memories resurface. These, too, connect to the collection’s themes—like “Migrants” making flock of swans the catalyst for recalling how an uncle died saving another boy from drowning. “The Spider” has us watching the delicate work of a silk spinner, all too aware that a human hand means destruction of its life’s work. What makes these pieces great is the tension between their often unassuming subjects juxtaposed to a feeling of death and destruction that McCarrick keeps lurking nearby.

Sweeney as a Girl puts the reader in the eye of the whirlpool and keeps us spinning around the elemental concepts of Jaki McCarrick’s world. I found myself swimming with it, going with the flow as I gravitated towards one kind of poem or another only to find it once again later, drifting my way. McCarrick has smartly put together a collection of punchy, impactful poetry that settles on you like a film the way it will stay with you long after you’ve resurfaced. ​