The Important Things

The Important Things review – Poetry Ireland Review

 

Perhaps the most contemporary in its focus of these four collections is Audrey Molloy’s debut, The Important Things, which, while similarly attuned to themes of loss and grieving, adds a fresh burst of pop culture into the mix. Molloy’s voice is irreverent and conversational, and her opening poem, ‘The Apprentice’, draws us immediately into a surreal dream-space which marries earth language with vivid imagery redolent of a de Chirico painting:

 

We were playing a game called Musical Wives

and she was ahead. We sat in our bias-cut slips,

 

sipping vermouth in bare feet and lipstick,

and she told me his genitals looked different

 

when lying on his side, like the Tsar Pushka cannon

she saw in the Kremlin, with its half-cocked shaft . . .

 

These are poems concerned with our inner wildness and how we balance that wildness wit the demands of everyday life. In poems that deal with relationship break-ups, ageing, and parenthood, Molloy consistently allows us to glimpse the unruly id peeking through. In the collection’s most memorable poems, such as ‘On Reaching 45 the Poet Realizes She Is Only 23’, this wild creature becomes actualised and stands before us, a figure reminiscent of an ancient nature deity, and charged with visceral longing:

 

Flaying the torso was painful, but how proud I was of my high round breasts, my belly rippling where it met the pelt reaching up to my waist. You sexy fuck, I whispered to the creature in my bathroom mirror, then grabbed each ear and pulled upwards.

 

These are formally inventive poems, with Molloy demonstrating a keen insight into how the prose poem, in particular, can give the poet that little bit of extra space to tease out the details that make a poem really gleam. In ‘What I Learned from the Dentist’, the speaker and the dentist, both emigrants far from home, find connections that are both surprising and meaningful. As reflections on language and movement go, it’s highly original and hugely engaging:

 

We are alike, he says. In cities the world over, for every Chinese restaurant there is an Irish pub. Why no Irish restaurants? I say, why no Chinese pubs? He laughs and utters a word I don’t understand to Joy. She aspirates my spit. The tube grabs the words from my tongue.

 

As with the other three collections reviewed here, The Important Things is keenly attuned to the cycle of loss and birth, with some fine, moving poems at the collection’s end dealing with the death of a mother and the birth of a child. It’s intriguing to see the different voices of the poets gathered here in conversation on this theme, both so personal and so universal. Audrey Molloy’s ‘Confetti’, in particular, is deeply affecting; a testament to the way that the written word can facilitate an important last connection over great distance.

 

They calm you but you want to speak

so they press the small sponge to your lips

so you can tell me — through your morphine haze —

 

that my letter arrived that morning,

they’ve read it to you, over and over,

and each time you feel as though you’re covered in roses.

 

Reading these four collections in tandem, I was struck by the thematic and geographical echoes which abound, and how these four singular voices seem to converse across time and space. If their voices could speak as one, I think they would affirm the power of the written word to sustain us in times of trouble.

— Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 135

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Beyond the Ordinary

The Important Things, by Audrey Molloy, Gallery Press, 80 pp, €12.95, ISBN: 978-1911338024 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1911338031 (hbk)
Satyress, by Audrey Molloy, Southword Editions, 38 pp, €6, ISBN: 978-1905002719

While a few of Audrey Molloy’s poems afford glimpses of her family life in Sydney, her verse funnels out into a broader world. Narratives that describe dramatic natural settings reveal the poet’s sense of wonder inspired by a keen naturalist interest. Frequently, her poems encompass a sphere that includes her native Ireland and places in Europe and elsewhere. But all of that is merely a starting point, a prologue, since her poetic vision also expands into an interior world where anything is possible: alternative lived experiences, unknown passions, adventures not circumscribed by the social norms of her local community, and exploits that take place in an imagined past, present or future.

Molloy’s naturalist viewpoint and scientific bent coexist with an interest in the arts, humanities and world affairs, and with a sensibility for affairs of the heart. Her poetry squarely addresses the question “Can a woman living an ordinary life be a Renaissance man?” She shares with readers a world view in which our personal condition and life circumstances need not limit what we may imagine or accomplish. By sharing her vision she forms a bond with readers that is strengthened when she portrays herself in her formative years, coming of age during the 1970s on Ireland’s east coast. Give or take a few details, her story is ours too, an identification that recalls Whitman’s transcendental feelings expressed in Leaves of Grass: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume.” Molloy’s poetry reveals the place we all have in our lives for imagination and creativity – these need not be remote and separate domains.

While Molloy’s poetry occasionally depicts aspects of life in Australia, she remains essentially an Irish poet in terms of her identity and much of the content of her verse, an emerging writer with a strong presence in the Irish literary scene, who also displays an appreciative attitude towards her chosen home country.

In “The Apprentice”, she depicts her formative years as a schoolgirl friend tutors her in the mysteries of sexual experience:

We were playing a game called Musical Wives
and she was ahead. We sat in our bias-cut slips,

sipping vermouth in bare feet and lipstick,
and she told me his genitals looked different

when lying on his side, like the Tsar Pushka cannon
she saw in the Kremlin, with its half-cocked shaft

and squat wheels. It looks small but feels big, she said,
like a tooth when your tongue runs along it.

In “A Brief History of Smoking” Molloy portrays her early experimentation with adult behaviour in a way that comes to readers as a flash of recognition:

I blame Madonna. My fingerless gloves got me busted. Mother, always the fashionista, tried them on, held them to her cheek, blanched at the whiff of stale smoke and searched my room. The contraband, a pack of Drum (Milde Shag), was on my person as I followed her around, but she found it in the pocket of my blazer and burnt it in the Aga.

In the poignant and ironic “Envy Is a Day Lily”, Molloy’s writing recalls the tongue-in-cheek grace of American poet Billy Collins:

At the end of the street
behind the supermarket
where pretty houses peter out,
there’s yours.

Broadleaf weeds
outside the torn fly-screen,
where a Cavalier King Charles
eyes you, head to one side.

You can’t answer his question,
but know this: someone
once looked upon your life
and wished it were theirs.

“Mood Rings” from the pamphlet Satyress is an essential Molloy poem exemplifying the poet’s characteristics as a writer: she is at once frank, playful, and ironic. Here are the first four stanzas:

There’s a mood on the way to melancholia
right before the slide, the tinkle of light

piano in a minor key, how the sun’s low angle
flatters your fickle hide,

how your face, reflected in a gallery window
looks momentarily like

Catherine Deneuve’s ‑ high cheekbones,
heavy eyelids shot in black and white.

The concluding stanzas of the poem evoke a shifting state of mind, as auditory cues and understated drama suggest moods ranging from contentment to melancholy.

One note from an oboe and this moment’s
the icing on the breeze block in your pocket

and you know that in the likely event
of free-fall there’s half a Valium in a locket

around your neck that you haven’t needed so far
and that’s reassuring; by now

you’re so calm your chest barely rises, barely falls
and your aura turns aqua as you slide into blue.

In “Elegy for a Limb”, Molloy focuses on details that evocatively portray a former partner. Without overtly describing her subject, she composes a sketch conveying a sense of the person and something of the story between them.

I’d forgotten how he takes his tea.
You’d think fourteen years would leave
an imprint as detailed as the fossil filaments
of a feather; the contours of his hands,
the half-moons of his fingernails.
Fingers are square, the jeweller said,
not round, so he made a four-sided ring,
white gold with a sapphire.
The children said he lost it in the sea.

In “What We Learned at Loreto”, Molloy evokes her early years with a vividness that brings the moment into clear focus:

Nothing useful, like how to apply fake tan
with a sports sock for an even finish
or the way to separate mascara-clotted
eyelashes with the stem of your earring.
Some simple rules would have been handy:
short hem or low-cut ‑ but never together,
and how to keep a bit of mystery.

Narrating poignant details from the bleary past, the poet forms a bond of recognition with readers as a receding world momentarily comes into sharp focus:

All that’s keeping me from swift death by lamp-post
is the dashboard clock churning up dates:
Ten fourteen, the Battle of Clontarf.
Eleven eleven, the Synod of Rathbreasail.
Twelve fifteen, the Magna Carta.

In “Flowering Cherry”, Molloy reaches further back, narrating in the opening lines of this poem a scene that occurs when her young parents-to-be are seeking to purchase their first home.

A tree can sell a house, the agent says,
when they view 10 Beech Drive as newlyweds.
Its shot-silk trunk stands so close to the hedge
its blossom carpet-bombs the street by May.
Come June, it casts lemonade shade as tar-
seams melt, stick to bare feet kicking cans
or skipping ropes slung between the footpaths,
grounded only for a passing car.
September’s red and ochre pot-pourri
of leaves will bank against the windowsills.
Boughs that vein the sky in winter will
be knobbed with sticky buds again by spring.
Four years my young mother sees it bloom
before my bud unfurls, pink, in her womb.

In “Sold a Pup”, dedicated to the memory of Anthony Minghella, Molloy deploys an ambiguous and well-modulated sense of irony to share a romantic moment that many readers might easily relate to:

I envied Kristin Scott Thomas, emerging from the biplane,
shaking out the halo of her mane; her slim silhouette

against the Cairo night sky; making love in a church
cloakroom while, outside, ladies ate mince pies. I liked her

best reflected in his convex eye, I can still taste you.
Yes, this, what they talk of when they talk of love.

Funny, how you never shot her with a social worker,
nibbling a stale wafer as they rehash it one more time,

(…)

Oh, Anthony, if I ever get you on your own in a cobble-
stone alley there’ll be hell to pay, my darling.

Abruptly returning to reality for the moment, let us take a look now at a few lines from the poet’s “Double-Life Diary”, published in Satyress:

Friday
6 p.m. Arsenic hour.
Nit combs, home-readers, sight-words,
permission-notes, show-and-tells.

(…)

Later. She will bleach the sink and pots.
Or write a poem. She will have the second
square of chocolate and a glass of Sancerre,
but abstain from all news and current affairs.

(…)

She’ll dredge Barbie’s vacant, smiling head
from a bath half-full of stagnant water.
Pilates tomorrow. Maybe.

Molloy’s poems often appear to question why we spend so much time in quotidian reality since there are so many other interesting places to visit when we are struck by the urge to get away from things. The following poem is called “The Ologist’s Ego, Conquered”:

He said he’d snuck out for the night, he’d recently separated
from the pre-frontal cortex of a doctor
and what did I think of that?

He wouldn’t be drawn on the specialty
but it had to be an ologist of sorts ‑
there was something of the teenager

about his forearms, pale and smooth,
his hands with their close-clipped fingernails
that foretold microsurgery.

While the doctor slept, tucked up with his trophy wife,
his ego had slipped from the house and I found myself
next to him at 4 a.m. in the garden bar.

(…)

Reader, we needed no line of coke,
no champagne fountain; it was going to happen
and it was simply a matter of where.

A peacock screamed from the topiary.
The best thing about a pelt, I discovered,
as distinct from a frock or skinny jeans,

is the freedom it affords shenanigans.
This was hardly making love,
but a savage mating among mock orange and fig.

Damn him, he was good and he knew it; (…)

Many of the poems in Molloy’s pamphlet Satyress and in her recently launched collection The Important Things are roughly contemporaneous. Thematically, Satyress deals with the poet’s development as a person, while the collection, which includes updated versions of nine poems taken from Satyress, follows her adventurous trajectory as she negotiates an odyssey involving geographic distance, relationships and personal discovery. Although The Important Things represents the best of Molloy’s poetry to date, inquiring souls who delve into Satyress will find poems of interest that shed further light on her early work.

In a brief article recently published in the Poetry Ireland Review, Molloy uses the launching of a rocket ship as an extended metaphor to give readers insight into the process of publicly launching herself as a writer, culminating a decade and a half of painstaking groundwork, during which she meticulously honed the technical aspects of her craft. More than a feeling of having arrived somewhere, the verse published in Satyress and The Important Things conveys to readers the sense of a writer having taken off and now heading for points unknown.

— Dick Edelstein, Dublin Review of Books

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I’ve resorted to scanning google maps and zooming in on places I used to love as a child.’

Sydney-based writer Audrey Molloy who grew up in Wexford has just published her first collection of poems ‘The Important Things’

The award-winning poet Audrey Molloy whose first collection ‘The Important Things’ has just been published by The Gallery Press, is missing her visits back to Ireland so much that she has resorted to scanning Google maps and zooming in on places she remembers from her childhood.

A daughter of retired Blackwater garda sergeant Tom Molloy, Audrey grew up in Wexford where she attended the Loreto secondary school. She moved to Australia in 1998 and now considers Sydney her permanent home.

But she loves her trips to Ireland which are on hold due to the pandemic. ‘We had to cancel a planned three-week trip to Wexford, Baltimore and Roundstone last year. It broke my heart. As the Australian government announces prolonged border closures I have become increasingly homesick.

‘I’ve resorted to scanning Google Maps and zooming in on places I used to love as a child. We lived for a year in Rathnure, in the Blackstairs mountains, when I was eight. I was looking at satellite pictures of woods I used to play in with the local children and I recently reconnected with Helen Byrne (nee Furlong), who was my childhood friend and partner in tree-climbing and strawberry thieving.’

Audrey’s first collection of poems with titles including ‘What we Learned at the Loreto’ to ‘Lockdown Boogie’ explores a wide range of topics from the everyday to the surreal in a distinctive and original voice and an unusual display of poetic forms.

‘The Important Things’ is described as a woman’s tale told in feisty, sensual, strange and beautiful poetry. It chronicles the end of her marriage and the discovery of new love and a renewed passion with the poem ‘Know you Tried’ concluding the book’s opening section.

The second part comprises a sequence of poems that mourn the passing of her mother, Iris who died in 2009 and savour memories and rue missed opportunities.

In 2019, her dad Tom proudly collected a Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry on her behalf for the poem ‘At the Shell Midden’ and the same year, she received an An Post Irish Book Award for Irish Poem of the Year.

Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Ireland, England and Australia.

Audrey recalls writing poetry as a child around the time the family lived in Rathnure, and on a trip to Ireland several years ago, she discovered a hardback diary from 1981 with the typical entries of an eight-year old and an index of poems from A-Z, starting with Autumn, in little quatrains of metric, rhyming poetry.

‘That phase passed and travel journals and blogging aside, I didn’t return to creative writing for another 30 years. Then, one day I woke up with a poem in my head, fully formed, and wrote it down on a few post-it notes. It was a love poem. After that they just kept coming.’

She loved reading poetry at school and had ‘a fantastic English teacher’ in Ita Cummins of Crosstown, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago. ‘She was big on poetry and definitely instilled a love of the classics in me and my classmates. If she was a few minutes late for class, she would arrive to find us all reciting poetry in unison’.

After leaving school, she did science in college and is currently studying online for an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Manchester Metropolitan University, getting up in the small hours for lectures.

‘When I started to write, poetry seemed to be how the words came out. The short lyric form seemed to suit the emotion being conveyed as well as the time I had available to write, having three young children to look after at that time.

‘Through poetry, I was able to write about the emotions I experienced at the end of my marriage and on the difficulty of losing my mother to cancer.

‘Finding these poems pouring out of me was a huge surprise. I didn’t set out to be a writer or always yearn to be a poet. It just happened. I think it was always in there and eventually, heated by emotion, it bubbled over.’

Audrey is mother to Grace (14), Harry (12) and Emily (9). She has a day job as an optometrist and she also works part-time in a communications role for the professional body Optometry Australia.

‘The days that I don’t work, I have the time that the children are at school to attend to reading, writing and editing poetry.’

She moved to Sydney in 1998, initially intending to stay for a year, as part of a longer round-the-world trip but she fell in love with the place.

‘It’s a naturally stunning city. The beaches and harbours and parks are world class. I love my home country too. I usually travel to Ireland every year and catch up with my large, extended family and friends.’

She visited Ireland twice in 2019 for the Poetry Ireland Introduction Series. ‘I got to spend Easter with my dad in Wexford, which was wonderful. It’s such a beautiful season in Ireland, with trees in blossom and buds popping up everywhere. We walked every day in the grounds of Johnstown Castle, near to my dad’s house.’

She finds Facebook great for finding and keeping in touch with people in Ireland including school friends from the Loreto, Dot Lynch, Orla Kinsella, Siona Mooney, Sarah Doyle, Niamh McDonald, Eileen Igoe and Andrea Kennedy.

She considers Sydney her permanent home. ‘My life is here now with my children and my man. I have my regular holiday spots, along the New South Wales coast, in Jervis Bay and Blueys Beach, and my favourite foreshore walks that I do most days.

She feels very ‘fortunate and honoured’ to be published by the Gallery Press,based in Oldcastle, County Meath, publishers of some of her favourite poets, including Derek Mahon.

‘I am thrilled with the book – it’s a beautiful production with its classic cover and artwork by talented Cork artist Megan Eustace.’

The poems in ‘The Important Things’ were written between 2013 and 2020 but represent only a fraction of the poems she has written in that period.

‘My editor, Peter Fallon was a wonderful guide in selecting which poems to include in the collection. The second part of the book consists of a suite of poems about my mother’s life and death and were all written in the early weeks of 2019. That year was the 10th anniversary of my mother’s death and it took me that long to process what I had to say about her.’

While she doesn’t write poetry every day, there is poetry in every day, from reading a few poems while sitting beside the pool at her children’s swimming lessons, editing a friend’s poem — one of her favourite poetic activities – or thinking about a good line for a poem while out walking.

‘I’m time poor and poetry has to be squeezed into tight spaces. I usually write regularly very week, rather than every day. ‘The Important Things’ is available by post from the publisher at www.gallerypress.com and from book shops.

— Maria Pepper, Wexford People

Winner of the 2021 Anne Elder Award, presented by Australian Poetry.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize.

One of The Irish Times Best Books of 2021 selected by Martina Evans.

Publication date: 24 June 2021
Details: 80pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 802 4
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 803 1

Cover: ‘Cleave 1, 2004’ by Megan Eustace, watercolour on paper