Jean Bleakney is a Northern Irish poet whose work engages deeply with the natural world, as well as themes such as memory and urban life. Since her debut collection, The Ripple Tank Experiment, was published in 1999, Bleakney has become one of the most respected poets in Northern Ireland.
Jean Bleakney’s ‘Consolidation’ is a deeply personal poem about the act of rearranging the cowry shells that the speaker and her children gathered in the past.
Some sunny, empty afternoon
I’ll pool our decade’s worth
and more of cowrie shells
gathered from that gravel patch
‘Nightscapes’ beautifully captures the feeling of being isolated from nature that is common in urban environments.
If this was Donegal
I wouldn’t be able to breathe
for fear of swallowing stars…
‘Winterisation’ subtly weaves the processes of preparing for winter and steeling oneself for news of bereavement.
Halloween at the caravan.
All along the strand
sand is rearing up
like smoke from a bush fire.
‘Donegal Sightings’ explores how elusive the natural world can feel, even when we are immersed within its beauty.
You would need three weather eyes
out here on Dawros Head where the sky,
Atlantic laden, signals its intentions
in airbrushed cliffs and disappearing islands;
‘Spring’ is an unsettling poem that explores the dangers of devotion and deferring happiness instead of living in the present.
It spills from sun-shocked evenings in March
and slit seed-packets, buckled into spouts.
She palms and strokes and shunts them, via heart-line;
index-fingers them to rows of labelled pots.
‘A Watery City’ engages with themes of friendship and journeying, significantly how they are affected by the passage of time.
Well if I’d known how many bridges there were in that city
I’d have worried for your soul and I’d never have written
Hope the prose is flowing as effortlessly as the Lee if
I’d considered the sea. I hadn’t reckoned on reversible rivers.
‘Csontváry’s Flowers’ is a fascinating insight into one extraordinary artist’s view of the work of another.
The thin ribbon of sky, and thinner still,
blued hints of the easterly Carpathians
then down into the whole arboretum of blue-greens and greens
closing in around the valley town of Selmecbánya
‘How Can You Say That?’ is a humorous and thoughtful rebuttal of belittlement which reflects the struggle of women in the twentieth century.
I am your wife.
I can name and nurture
twenty-nine hardy geraniums.
‘Breaking the Surface’ by Jean Bleakney is about the “art of skimming,” an extended metaphor for the art of writing poetry.
I have gone beyond the childish delight
of plumping the heaviest stone
into the shallows, and yet,
distance throwing has defeated me.
‘Out to Tender’ explores the uneasiness felt by many during the 1994 ceasefire in Northern Ireland and expresses their fear and doubt.
All along the motorway
they’re resurfacing and bridge-strengthening
and seeding the central reservation
with wild flowers.
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