Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara" by Cathy Galvin

Some poems use form and language to weave gold from the ordinary stuff of life; others take extraordinary (even extreme) topics and much of the interest may lie in their subject matter; others engage with what used to be disparagingly called "local colour" – especially of place or identity – and Cathy Galvin’s debut collection is in part of this sort. Her great grandfather built a cottage on Mason Island, Connemara, after the Great Hunger (1845-52). She remembers visiting it as a child, but it now lies in ruins. Her wish is to preserve and empathise with what it represents of landscape, nature, the people, their culture and language. Her desire is contrasted to the cold impersonality of those who once studied these peoples on the edge of Europe as an inferior species, to the extent of stealing skulls from graves for closer analysis.

Much of the interest in Ethnology lies in Galvin’s representation of these (extra)ordinary lives, in learning their language, archival research, and imagining their day-to-day existence. The opening poems are rather fragmentary and one feels the "willed" pressure of pursuing her admirable aim. "Ethnology" itself is a fine poem in which an island child, having been studied by an ethnologist, recounts the kinds of human experience that he (definitely a "he") could never be party to: "I searched for seals, their singing / making me pause." Poems about Galvin's own mother, Bridget, are replete with familial emotion and are the better for it. In "Waters Break" and "Caoineadh," a freer lyricism breaks from Galvin, giving rise to a heartfelt keening or lamentation: "I stand on the granite, a flawed empty vessel // I pull you towards me, I shelter your body."

The third section of the collection is dotted with name-dropping (Hughes, Heaney, Murphy, Synge, Friel – though most are linked variously to the Connemara landscape), yet it also contains a marvellous address to the personification of the ruined cottage itself: "Crossing your threshold, time after time, / I believed your buried mouth, / its falling walls and gaping hearth, had lost its tongue" ("Belly of the House"). The personal is political here as the point is made that these "marginal" lives – this is how the educated, observing "elites" (Galvin’s word) viewed the "peasants" of Connemara – were rich in language, culture and passionate life. The same idea contributes to Galvin’s concluding keening for her own son (who took his life in 2021). Her grief and sense of guilt are almost unbearably painful to read. After an autopsy, she buries his heart on the ancestral island (which he "loved"), and we sense her anger that his difficulties in life were never taken seriously enough by the "elite" authorities, such as the DWP, the medical MDT, and those administering PIP payments, the termination of which "set him free / to die alone." If the poems struggle at times to compass the flood of feelings, this remains a book rich and painful in its portraits of lives lived over a century or more.

About the reviewer

Martyn Crucefix is the author of eight original collections of poetry, most recently Our Weird Regiment (Shearsman Books, 2026). His most recent translation is of Jurgen Becker’s Foxtrot at the Erfurt Stadium (Shearsman, 2026).

You can read more about Ethnology by Cathy Galvin on Creative Writing at Leicester here.