Reviews

Storm Over Belfast

Sunday Tribune Interview 6th July 2008

Review from the IRISH MAIL ON SUNDAY by Sheena Davitt

Mary O'Donnell's short stories seem to capture perfectly the inner voices of a strikingly varied collection of characters ... 'Fado, Fado' is that rare thing: a balanced depiction of the Celtic Tiger, in which a father's concerns about his daughter's first forays into Dublin's mall culture are set against his unsentimental memories of the darker, authoritarian upbringings of a previous generation of his
family.

'Little Africa' (is) a moving account of an African boy's adjustment to his new life in contemporary Ireland. It is another virtuoso demonstration of O'Donnell's ability to create compelling characters and offers a portrait f Irelad from an outsider's perspective. With her uncannily accurate skewering of a range of subjects, her ability to get down on the page how people actually think, and her wonderful eye for detail, O'Donnell's writing is of the type that gives realism a good name.

Review in The Irish Times, Sat, May 24, 2008

A touch of class
DEREK HAND

SHORT STORIES:Mary O'Donnell's stories shine a brilliantly
illuminating light on the modem Irish world of middle-class unease

IRELAND IS SUPPOSEDLY a classless society, free of the rigid demarcations that underpin the lives lived in other places and other nations. Of course, we know better: there is class in Ireland, but no one wants to make it exactly dear what the rules and regulations that govern its operation might actually be. Androids might dream of electric sheep, but the huddled masses of the Irish coping class also dream their dreams. And it is those dreams, and indeed nightmares, which are played out in Mary O'Donnell's new collection of short stories, Storm Over Belfast.

The focus of these stories ranges over a variety of situations and themes. From the disturbing portrayal of a father being confronted with his teenage daughter's burgeoning sexuality in Fadó, Fadó, to the predicament of a mother coming to realise the permanency of motherhood and its responsibilities in Charlie, St Joseph, Big-Hands God; from the superbly drawn battle between knowing old age and the indifferent arrogance of youth in Come to Me, Maitresse, to the understated nervousness of two college girls' summer spent working in Germany in the quietly effective Yugoslavia of My Dreams. Anger, fear, confidence and insecurity - all the modern emotions - provide the fulcrum round which these stories find their energies and revolve.

No liaison is ever presented as anything other than perplexingly complicated and all are suitably imbued with a potential for venomous interaction.

There is often an underlying violence, both real and implied, in these exchanges, as O'Donnell teases out the endless positioning for power and authority that marks modern relationships in terms of career, friends and family.

The sex act becomes one more element in this struggle for dominance, one more site where the cruelties can be worked through. Though not all unions are so negatively drawn: for instance, the couple in Strong Pagans, challenged by the husband's fetish for crossdressing, do come to a place of mutual understanding.

While there is darkness in some of these tales, the light touch of comedy is never too far away. Canticles, a story about a young music student's disappointment with her tutor's casually superior indifference, captures vividly the deliciously malicious possibility inherent in human relations, as the now-grown-up student exacts her revenge at the story's close. And Jethro, with decisive brevity, pokes fun at the pretentiousness of hippydippy parents and their hopes for their son's journey toward enlightened self-expression.

The world inhabited by O'Donnell's characters is up-to-date and contemporary: the semiotics of texting is on display, as are the Celtic Tiger Irish who now can live anywhere, in places where Irishness defines itself in relation to a wider world of reference. These cosmopolitan characters move to, and through, Australia, France, the cityscape and the rural scene effortlessly.

These are stories mostly of the Irish professional classes, such as academics and radio producers. Many stories have at their centres artist figures, with writers especially being focused on. It is a curious thing, how from the 19th century onward the figure of the artist embodies the modern conception of middle-class life, manifesting both that class's virtues, and its faults, most clearly.

Funnily enough, in the post-religious age, the artist - or the image of the artist in literature - has become the new secular arbiter of taste and morality, defining the codes by which we live.

The artist, too, is something of a dreamer and perfectly placed therefore to dream for the modern middle-classes. But of what do they dream?

Allegedly, of course, we dream of SUVs and holiday homes, of a better tomorrow. But Mary O'Donnell knows we dream of the possibility of dreaming itself. With these stories she shines a brilliantly illuminating light on the modern Irish world of middle-class anxious unease.

Hers are refreshingly grown-up, adult stories, centred on the desires, and the disappointments, of characters making choices that cannot be unmade or, indeed, made again. As a poet O'Donnell possesses an eye for detail the clutter of modem life in the form of material possessions, but also an eye for the subtleties of character.

There is too. a poet's stillness to be found in this often precise prose, a stillness appropriate to the nature of the revelations on offer to the reader.

Derek Hand is a lecturer in English in St Patrick's College, Drumcondra He has lust co-edited a special issue of the Irish University Review on the work of Benedict Kiely, which is due out next
month

Storm Over Belfast By Mary O'Donnell New lsland.246pp.

The Ark Builders

from Stride Magazine October 2009.

Noah Never Rests
The Ark Builders by Mary O’Donnell
In both subtle and striking ways, one senses that Mary O’Donnell’s most recent poems are shifting almost imperceptibly between past, present and projected future experience. In ‘The Bee-Keeper’s Son’, the longest of the poems forming her new volume, the speaker frets ‘he has not/come to his senses, where all at last/is pure synthesis.’ However, in closing the same poem O’Donnell soon indicates the tiny leaps which inform the seamless transitions so central to her writing:
            Each three century span, they quicken, at peace
            With sounds from within the ark: plane, chisel, blade,
            At peace with what’s beyond: creaking ropes, the mast
            Drying in the sun, a gentle slop of water as the hull cuts on,
            On, always west, following the sun. At night
            Before sleep, each boy takes a bee in his palm on trust:
            A gesture, a touching, creature to creature.
The separate concerns associated with Northern and Southern Irish poets remain blurred in O’Donnell’s output. As with her five previous collections, The Ark Builders reflects her affinity to both British influences and the heritage of the Irish Republic where she still lives in County Kildare. Born in 1954, O’Donnell has seen huge shifts in her lifetime, mainly towards the construction of the so-called New Ireland. Many of the more absorbing poems reveal a simultaneous optimism and anxiety about what those moves might mean for the future, so that the disquieting effect of nationalist and religious bigotry becomes meshed with hope of more multicultural and pro-European ways of living, as in the ambitions ‘Growing into Irish Through Galicia.’ Not only does this poem subvert the speaker’s clichéd expectation of Irishness through some young Spaniards who ‘perform with Uilleann pipes,/bodhrán, barrelling rhythms, wrist-flex, shoulder-roll,/ the music of ancient fields and isolation,/ where rain drenches memory.’ but O’Donnell also insists upon the necessity of personal transformation if traditionally entrenched and complacent attitudes are to be overcome so that a nation’s self-awareness can be allowed to grow.

The third stanza confirms that this poem is really about the act of nationalistic disability itself: how one must learn to navigate through language, politics, culture and history with an open mind:
Late learner, half-blind, tone-deaf.
Not your fault of course,
blame background, the Border, the bashful
silk of English,
one language hushed by the rhythms of the other,
until this rush to the senses.
Absolving the self is problematic and O’Donnell’s speaker ridicules herself for being a stranger; for having an outsider’s miscomprehension; and most tellingly, for her own naïve desires and yet she still hopes to find something truly authentic when ‘No longer backed up against the tide,/ the shell of your hearing opens,/ old words roll like sand in mussel-flesh,’ grit to a pearl.’ This strain of optimism dominates the poem’s ending whereby she can ‘expand, singing out hellos,/ Ireland to Galicia and back again.’
Moments of transition are also prominent in a number of poems where O’Donnell becomes more concerned with what she alludes to in one title as ‘Ageing Girls’ whose cosmetic obsessions seem bound up with female creativity and sexual desire. These themes also carry other connotations in further poems: especially as O’Donnell is much given to setting her women in versions of art history. In ‘The Sisters of Viareggio’, for example, she transposes a Renaissance painted composition to express something of institutionalised motherhood . . . Likewise, a familiar painted image from the past dominates ‘Café Terrace at Night 1888’, a poem which again relies on the writer’s visual exactness: ‘This morning I turn to those yellows // On Van Gogh’s café terrace,/ Atavistic, darkly cottoned, like / The woman with the red shawl, // Head inclined like a bird.’

These painterly poems are the highlight of this moving and emotionally precise collection. At her best, O’Donnell discovers the unflinching directness with which both visual art and literature can communicate with us in times of deliberation and confusion. All through her production of these poems, as the title of the volume so aptly suggests, we can sense a constant and emphatic plea for a new beginning.

Some critical responses to 'September Elegies':

From The Irish Times (3rd October, 2003)

Kevin Myers, writing in The Irish Times (3 October) remarked that 'The death of her father last year informs and inspires many of the poems. Needless to say these are not maudlin affairs, but studied and gentle meditations upon life and love, upon the vital, unimportant details of daily existence, and upon the tiny quotidian duties of those who attend upon the last days of a loved one's life. ' Further on he remarks 'She is good on sex too: 'The Muse Demands My Tongue' should be read and remembered by every teenage girl as a lode-stone, a guide towards that strange place where heart and vulva meet. in other words, she does Eros very well indeed - sensuously, warmly, tenderly and always with humour.'

From poet Michael Coady comes the following commentary:
'This elegantly cadenced work shows Mary O'Donnell in mature possession of her distinctive voice and vision. In poems that seek 'to be true to the light and dark/ in each of us', the inner and outer search for meaning and fulfillment finds shapely utterance in the book's structured progression through the haunted towards the consolatory and on to the elegiac and tender. The transcendent is occasionally encountered ('the marvellous incarnate') and articulated in a register that is characteristically scrupulous, sensuous and subtle. Against the clear-eyed awareness that 'everything is borrowed' and that love 'rides on the brink of nothing', love remains the grounded act of faith that may exalt, transfigure and redeem the human experience and its mystery.

Some critical responses to 'The Elysium Testament':

From The Evening Press (5th November, 1999)

David Robbins finds himself highly impressed by Mary O'Donnell's latest work, The Elysium Testament.

Mary O'Donnell's new book is hard to define. It is full of mystery, yet it is not a thriller; it is an elegiac testament to a relationship, yet it is not a romance; it deals with our fear of the supernatural, yet it is not a horror story. It is, however, a powerful and beautifully-written novel.
Mary O'Donnell's first novel The Light-Makers, was published to critical acclaim in 1992. She is also an accomplished poet and broadcaster on literature. Her poet's instinct comes through strongly in her writing of The Elysium Testament.
The story is told by Nina in what is surely the longest suicide note in literary history. Her child Roland has died and she is writing to her ex-husband Neil, explaining how it all went wrong.
Surprisingly, the device works well, as the layers of what happened to Roland are peeled back one by one. Along the way, the story of Nina and Neil's marriage is told touchingly.
Nina is a restorer of grottoes, again surely a first for the profession of a novel's main protagonist. Her work on the restoration of a Co. Kildare cave is a metaphor for her retreat from what was happening to her marriage - and to her son.
Roland is Neil and Nina's second child. He is a special child, and the descriptions of him reminded me of the psychic child in the movie Poltergeist. Just how special he is becomes apparent when Nina sees him levitate, firstly, and bizarrely, over a pool of spilled Worcester sauce.
O'Donnell creates the special atmosphere that surrounds Roland, and as her description of him gradually deepens, the reader is aware of the Christ parallel: here is a child with powers the world cannot understand and must, therefore, destroy.
There are two set-pieces: a party thrown by Neil and Nina in their home by the weir in Lucan, and the final climactic scene in the restored grotto. Both are beautifully handled.
As Nina writes her long letter of self-justification, she begins her journey to self-forgiveness, and the novel ends on a note of hope. The power of O'Donnell's writing makes the plot, which sounds almost laughable when blandly told, seem real. It is a fine achievement.

From The Irish Times, (4th December, 1999): The Parent trap

Review by Kathy Cremin
The Elysium Testament is a savage exploration of the primal forces of transgression, fear and death. The narrative takes the form of an extended letter written by Nina to her husband, who has left her following the death of their four-year old son, Roland. Nina's letter - confessional, diary, suicide note - begins on Hallowe'en and continues over six haunted weeks as she tries to make sense of her son's death.
Elysium is the name both of the house where Nina now lives alone and of the grotto she most recently worked on. As a highly-sought-after restorer, Nina's work takes her to once-decadent estates to re-create lush caverns dedicated to Greek and Roman gods, ornate monuments to the mysteries of nature, fertility and excess. Through the beauty of rocks, crystals and ancient architecture, Nina believed herself and her husband to be in touch with the suppressed and sensuous world evoked by the decadent Monoan groggos - far from the spiritless, messed-up anaemia that passes for normality.
The passion triggered by destruction and death has terrible consequences, which unravel as the Elysium grotto, Nina's masterpiece of illusion, reaches completion. In pursuit of its perfection, Nina had escaped Roland for long periods. Her recognition of the boy's mysterious condition filled her with unease, and though she attempted to repress her feelings, her relationship with Roland became increasingly fraught.
What emerges is a record of Nina's failure to understand and accept her son's uncanny ways and her subsequent murderous desires to hurt and destroy aspects of his personality. The Elysium Testament is a provocative novel that bravely explores unspeakable secrets and the denial and complicity that surround terror in families. O'Donnell's writing is stark, clear and grimly witty, recalling the dark fables of Helen Dunmore or Michele Roberts.
There is, too, a dark, gothic aspect to this tale. The antiquated, half-forgotten groggos, decorated with bizarre objects like things picked from the underside of the human imagination, relate to the suppressed emotions of guilt, sin and fear which endure long after the forms of religion have been dispensed with. At the heart of the book is revealed a moral question for our times: what happens when a parent fails to thrive?

Emer Martin (author of 'More Bread or I'll Appear' Houghton Mifflin 1999) writes as follows (on Amazon.com): 'One of the most extraordinary things about this book is its portrayal of the ordinary middle class Irish family, which has often been ignored in modern Irish fiction or dismissed entirely … The writing sparkles with intense wit and Nina is extremely funny in her observations … A startling story of modern day saints, psychiatrists, twins real and imagined, dealing with the split self, the damaged self and ultimately and triumphantly, the transcendent self. Highly recommended.'

From the RTE Guide, (4th November, 1999)

This is a thoughtful, cerebral tale of motherhood, or art, of fragility, of life, of life's denial. Mary O'Donnell has taken an image and run with it, built on it. It's a disturbing and daring exploration.

From The Sunday Tribune (24th October, 1999)

This is writing at its purest and most powerful. Bravely exploring grief and guilt O'Donnell encapsulates heartbreak in a novel which is alternately terse and lyrical. She slices open a middle-class Irish family to reveal the tragedy which has a mother contemplating suicide. A successful architect whose specialty is restoring follies and grottoes, she is wrapped up in her work and in her affair with a colleague. Slowly we learn that her four-year-old son is not only neglected but beaten by her. She fears his powers, supernatural powers she herself had as a child. Distraught by the death of the child she sometimes hated, her urge to suicide seems logical.
Far from being a flight of fancy, The Elysium Testament is grounded in harsh psychological truth and is both horrifying and spellbinding It shows throughout that the author is also a poet.

From The Sunday Independent (14th November, 1999)

Review by Emer O'Kelly

Mary O'Donnell writes exhilarating, almost enthralling prose. That's the first thing that emerges from her third novel, The Elysium Testament. Her style is pellucid, the light seeming to glow from deep within the thought processes; but in almost stark contrast, the colours are etched with a miniaturist's brush, finely detailed, and so accurately expressive of the writer's purpose that they seem almost insultingly simple.
But there's nothing either simple or insulting about this intensely felt, metaphysical novel. Ostensibly, it tells the story of the breakdown of a marriage, and or how the bewildering, destructive love/hate of a mother for a mysterious child can bring about that breakdown.
But the novel is much more: it explores obsession, and fear of the unknown recesses of the human mind. Above all, it describes in pitiless detail the way absorption with beautiful form (in this case the restoration of ancient grottoes) can freeze the human spirit when it's untempered by the turbulent practicalities of love's generosity.
Nina's terror of what increasingly appears to be evidence of the saintly paranormal is echoed from her own bullied childhood, when, driven to swim competitively by a domineering father, she had visions of her dead mother as she ploughed through the chlorinated pool water.
and if Roland is heautoscopic, as the psychologists say (that is, he sees a doppelganger), Nina too has a doppelganger in her twin Hugon, who also plays a part in the tragedy that is precipitated.
O'Donnell weaves the thread of her complex thesis into a magic carpet of crawling horror: that a mother can torture in the pursuit of perfection, that learning can destroy passion, that beauty can be fiercely ugly.
The story is told in retrospect as Nina, her life in ruins and close to total nervous collapse, writes a series of maddened self-justifying testaments to her estranged husband. There is ultimate redemption for her, but even that is bleak, a harsh re-entry into a world in which she has always been an outsider.
But the literary achievement lies in the language which manufactures this psychologically surreal world:
"I watched the shadowy impring of the sun through the flying fog. It hung like a leaden ball and I thought, this is it. This lamp, ball, light, coalescence, is all there is. When it dies, and when the solar flares stop flaring, so will the seasons. So will we …"
And even in Nina's redemption, we remember only her eerie foresight, in this novel of soaring, elegant perception.

From The Irish Times, (23rd October, 1993)

'Spiderwoman's Third Avenue Rhapsody'
Review by Sean Dunne

Mary O'Donnell's new collection confirms the power and value of a voice which had its first outing in Reading the Sunflowers in September (1990). Quite simply, she is shaping up as one of the best poets in the place. The energetic title poem, with its shadow of Ginsberg, is not, as the blurb claims, ''stunning'' rather, her gift, which is distinguished by a strong and subtle awareness of language, is shown at its most assured in shorter poems.
There lies history an dartefact,
small arrows, darts,
a favourite tomahawk
dropped by a fleeing Indian,
splinters from a canoe
that shot the Hudson cataracts,
glistening with fish
while the future slept.
Encompassing America and Maynooth, and with themes that include a famine field, childbirth and Eve, Spiderwoman's Third Avenue Rhapsody offers a portrait of 'an original pilgrim/ who has seen/ something/ in cloud-ships/ ripe leaves/ the dripping wind'