Seeing Yellow by Eva Bourke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Seeing Yellow by Eva Bourke Adrian Frazier Seeing Yellow by Eva Bourke, pp. 96. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2018. €12.50 (paper). As a reviewer of Eva Bourke's new collection, which is also her best, I must declare an interest. We are Galway neighbors, and, in fact, one of the poems in this collection is dedicated to members of my family. It is written from a point of view within the Bourke household, but describing the Frazier children playing in the back garden. Look, the poet reflects to her husband (the late Eoin Bourke), they are living our old lives: "we watched them rewrite on its pages / the chapters of our beginnings in a script we had lost." But this familiarity of reviewer with the reviewed is common in Ireland, and almost impossible to avoid in a small, intensely literary country. It does not keep one from telling harsh truths in plain print (though there have been times when I wish it had). The truth about Seeing Yellow is not harsh; it is sweetness and summer light, and beautiful heartrending late afternoons. In the title poem, the poet and her husband bring to their old friend Pearse Hutchinson, dying in a Dublin hospital, a bunch of sunflowers, bearing them through a wet grey day "by their rough stalks like torches." The old poet had a long history with Catalonia and Van Gogh's Provence; he bathed his hands in the light of the sunflowers, saying, I can see yellow . . . I can see yellow. The poem is an easy, rich recollection of an epiphanic visit, ending not with a man going to heaven but with a natural supernaturalism, the old poet at the edge of an imagined field of sunflowers, "their dark sun faces, / their yellow light." The style of Eva Bourke's earlier collections was dominated by description, objects named and visualized precisely, and arranged in patterns and sequences [End Page 152] with an almost musical order, which led a reader to the implied significance. The scenes and experiences were not openly allegorized, though a reader was aware of a superior intelligence and empathetic sensitivity producing the poems, but under restraint, never appearing in the picture herself. This book of poems is different. It is openly autobiographical. The poems are easily understood, built up on real-life communicative acts. The dedications to her daughter, sons, brother, and neighbor reflect the fact that these poems really are gifts, embedded in the emotional transactions of an actual life. There is a letter to her brother in cancer treatment; a dramatic monologue by an Irish tenor who knew Mozart when the composer was having a hard time making a living in Paris; another by John James Audubon, the great painter—and killer—of bird life in North America; a poem addressed by the poet, an unbelieving daughter, to her Christian forefathers (and mothers); and finally, a letter poem to her husband about all the future plans (trips, concerts, reunions, anniversary parties) that have had to be cancelled when he suddenly died. This a book of poems that, by its end, leaves you with a lump in your throat. Very few poems in the collection are written in the same way, so far as line length, stanza, and voicing are concerned; this is a poet confident of her powers as a makar. Some of the lyrics are real sports, formal novelties that must have been difficult to make appear so easy. "Riddle Canon," for instance, takes off from the fact that in posing for a portrait, Bach playfully held a sheet of music upside down. The poem then—as Bach did in music—linguistically investigates the devious theme-and-variations play of his compositions, upside down, downside up, as "reflected in a glass ball, rolling." More friskily experimental still is "Disintegrating Love Poem Found on a Coffee Table at the Berlin Poetry Festival." This one is hilarious, with naughty glimpses, before it breaks up altogether in a melting alphabet. A reader is led through the collection by several themes—flowers, music, and above all, birds. The bird theme explained a mystery to this reviewer. I put out birdseed in the winter, but...