‘Seashells’ by Anne Donegan reviewed by Matt Mooney

Anne Donegan is from Fedamore in Co., Limerick where she grew up and enjoyed a very happy and carefree childhood. When she left home and took up a position with Allied Irish Bank in Galway, it was there that her love for Drama and the written word grew further. She then made the decision to study at night and complete a Teachers Diploma in Drama and Communications with the London College of Music and Communication. After completing a course in Train the Trainer in UL and TEFL, she started her own business in Communication skills  in Adare. She lived there for over 35yrs with her husband Mike where they raised their family,two daughters Kate and Anna. Listowel, where Mike is from and it was always their 2nd home, frequently visited enjoying all it has to offer including the beautiful beach of Ballybunnion nearby. They are now retired in Listowel and Ballybunnion in particular is a place of inspiration and solace for some of Anne’s writing. This is Anne’s debut book of poetry drawn from life’s experiences and she has has also written a play that will be produced in the Spring titled, Before the Goodbye Began. She has acted, directed, coached, trained and taught. The culmination of these skills are what has paved the way to her writing and launching her book, Seashells is dedicated to her husband Mike, daughters Kate and Anna and their four delightful grandchildren. Aoibh, Cara, Aifric and Ultan.

‘Seashells’ by Anne Donegan reviewed by Matt Mooney

Anne Donegan’s first collection of poems, Seashells, is so refreshing in its ever changing themes, mostly from her experiences of life as a young girl reared in rural Ireland in the shadow of the Galtee Mountains. 

 

‘I knew the screech of the pheasant the caw of the crow and the lonely cry of the curlew’.

 

She is so engrossing and entertaining, entering into fine detail, words tumbling out of her in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins, you will have to pinch yourself to see that she is not there across the table from you telling you her stories in poems laced with imagery. In her poem on milking a cow into a bucket she makes her mark: 

 

‘And the long drawn down squirts were

thin at first, tinkling at the bottom, 

then thickening to a chant, a crescendo’.

 

Such is the power of the poet in this book to put herself into her poetry and to make the characters of her time growing up, hop out of the poems they inhabit. ‘Away with the Fairies’ is one of her truly authentic poems that will stay in your mind, it’s so haunting  and compassionate and so cleverly crafted:

 

‘That’s what Jane did,

sit there near the bridge, swinging the leg,

licking a raspberry ripple’.

 

‘Bás an Oileáin’ is a poem I would go back to again and again for its sheer pathos. It’s based on a documentary on the decline and death of Inisark and the movement of the the last of its inhabitants to Inishbofin:

 

‘Houses moaned with emptiness, thatch rotted, nettles grew in graves and an eeriness invaded Shark’.

 

A human story of grief, of tragedy at sea, of isolation and abandonment with echoes in it of The Blasket Islands and its demise. 

 

Breaking free into the future, to present times, she vents her anger and frustration at a few levels, one of them being the mushrooming of wind turbines: 

 

Truth dawns.

Turbines spawn’.

 

In another poem she rallies the women of the free world to take action in a poem on Gaza,  castigating the warlords and calling for a:  

 

‘quenching of the flames that stoke the grey-haired egos.’ 

 

and to:

 

‘Rule from our matriarchal table’.

 

This is a most engaging and stimulating book. On scything she tells us musically:

 

‘He swung a wide and rhythmic stroke,

swaying, swishing, to and fro in the air, cutting close to the ground’.

 

On finding a stone in the shape of a heart by the sea she says of it: 

 

‘Perfect in form, no pulse, no beat,

no life, a magnificent find, cold stone, lone stone. Mine’. 

 

Charming, and you will be charmed too. Treat yourself to ‘Seashells’. You will relish Anne’s poems.

Published by JM Agency. 

Available for purchase from: https://www.buythebook.ie/product/seashells/

Price: €15 plus P/P.     

       

Matt Mooney, a native of Galway, lives in Listowel, Ireland. He has six collections of poetry, one in Irish, Éalú. Steering by the Stars is his most recent title. Matt is winner of The Pádraig Liath Ó’Conchubhair Award, a deputy editor and poetry reviewer for The Galway Review. Long listed for the Fish Poetry Prize. He has featured on Lime Square Poets and Cultivating Voices Live Poetry, and his work has been published in The Blue Nib, Feasta, The Stony Thursday Poetry Book, The Mill Valley Literary Review, Vox Galvia, Live Encounters, among others. Matt has a number of multilingual publication credits as well, such as The Amaravati Poetic Prism, I Can’t Breathe, Immagines & Poesia, Canto Planetaria, and Ukraine, an Anthology of War Poems. To learn more about Matt Mooney, visit https://www.mattmooneypoetry.com/