Book review: Lilies on the deathbed of Étaín and Other Poems, by Oisín Breen

This new collection from Edinburgh-based Irish poet Oisín Breen is a remarkable voyage through birth, death, ancient legends and unknowable futures, writes Joyce McMillan

Oisín Breen is an Irish poet, journalist and academic currently resident in Edinburgh; and to judge by the extraordinary power, confidence and beauty of his second poetry collection, the city is fortunate to have him.

Lilies On The Deathbed Of Étaín and Other Poems is a slim 50-page volume that falls into three parts. The first, in six parts, is the 17-page title poem, which shapes a mighty meditation about death, desire and loss around glimpses of the story of Étaín, a beautiful female figure of Irish mythology who was born twice, 1012 years apart, and therefore represents profound forces of youth, age and rebirth. To say that Breen’s poetry is easy to read would be misleading. It proceeds sometimes in short lines, sometimes in long, dense paragraphs that look like prose; and sometimes it deploys words of which you have never heard, “erubescent” being a favourite.

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Yet if you have the nerve and breath-control to read Lilies On The Deathbed Of Étaín aloud, you will find yourself caught up in an astonishing rolling surge of poetic energy and purpose, which carries the reader along at a level far above, below or beyond literal meaning. In a foreword, Breen says that his academic life involves examining the relationship between “the complexity paradigm and narratology”, and that he believes meaning fully emerges from the relationship (“interrelationality”) between language-as-form and language-as-music.

Oisín Breen PIC: Robyn ThomasOisín Breen PIC: Robyn Thomas
Oisín Breen PIC: Robyn Thomas

And impenetrable as the jargon may be, a half-hour immersion in the force of his writing is enough to offer a glimpse of what he means, as he plunges into the natural world for a rich, unfailing backdrop of surging life, melds images and ideas with an Eliot-like intensity, remakes language and sound to suit his purposes, and writes both of the moment of death, and of timeless, life-changing moments of sexual desire, with a sensual vividness that takes the breath away. The final effect is like some great orchestral suite, with added swathes of explicit meaning; Irish, universal, strong, bold, tremendously lyrical, and even featuring a dream-like walk down from Princes Street to Warriston Cemetery, where the poet glimpses “the face of God”.

The second section of the book, the 22-page Love Song of Ana Rua, seems a little less confident and a little more experimental, as Breen moves often into fragments of Irish, and breaks up a pattern of stanzas with brief lines of mouth-music that sound almost Maori or South Pacific in intonation, riffing on the name Ana Rua. Yet still, this eight-part meditation on a love affair – perhaps over, but then again always present – has a similar poetic energy to the title poem, surging and fading, crafting a recurring series of thoughts and experiences into an ever-shifting symphony of sounds, feelings and ideas.

The book is completed by four shorter two-page poems, easier to grasp and more tightly focussed, of which the first – Six Months Bought With Dirt: The Bothy Crop Of Arranmore – is a meditation on 19th century Irish agricultural labourers working in Scotland that would fairly scorch the soul with its tightly-crafted empathy and anger.

Then we see, through the poet’s transforming eyes, four ducks swimming together, the last survivors of a once much larger colony; we see a shimmering vision of human desire unfulfilled in a Roman garden; we see puffins playing in the light. And with that image, this brief, wonderful roller-coaster journey through the vision of Oisín Breen is over; leaving us breathless and elated, after a remarkable voyage through death and birth, through ancient legend and unknowable futures, and – above all – ever deeper into the pulsing mystery of the moment in which we live, right now.

Lilies on the deathbed of Étaín and Other Poems, by Oisín Breen, Beir Bua Press, 50pp, £5.99

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