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 allusions (to 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 died 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, 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. 

 

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva" by Cathy Galvin

Famously, in Dante’s Inferno, the poet follows Virgil down through the circles of hell, meeting the famous dead en route. In Cathy Galvin’s new and compelling pamphlet, Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva, the narrator follows Godiva (‘Godgifu’) round the circles of Coventry ring road, ‘following a road, a river, a prayer.’ 

This is not really an inferno – the narrator remarks at one point ‘there are no circles of hell, just this road’ – but rather a kind of limbo, a ‘circling sandstone,’ which, at least in these poems, delineates a circular history, as much as it does a city’s geography. Like W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Galvin’s beautiful pamphlet is a walk through a circular, eternally-recurring history of destruction – from the city’s bombing in the Second World War, to the ruinous rebuilding of the city in the 1950s and 60s, to the poverty and job losses of the 80s, captured by the Specials in their well-known song about Coventry, ‘Ghost Town,’ and ultimately to post-industrial decay:

          Just watch me walk beside the demolition
          of buildings that once rose to post-war visions,
          the planners pleased the bombs sanctioned their plans …

          [then] more bombs. More cries of Liberty. Unions,
          monasteries, militants, all have their day;
          Carmelites and car factories the same. 

For the poet, these wider histories of destruction and rebuilding are intertwined with her own personal history: she notes that ‘the ring road … was built the year I was born,’ and her parents, who came to Coventry to work in the car factories, are buried in a cemetery close by one of the ring road’s flyovers. ‘Words wait in my flow to return,’ declares the poet, and the poems themselves are a kind of ring road, marking a circular return to home and the poet’s past. Ring road is history, geography, poem – and even human body: just as the ring road seems to contain the city’s past, so ‘the dead walk within our hearts’: ‘I stroll my body back to what holds within / its light, its stone, its bare bones.’ 

This is a past that does not vanish, but persists like light, held in the body, in stone, in the road, in Galvin’s haunted poetry; the dead may be dead, but they also ‘walk within our hearts.’ This a cyclical history that is not just a matter of circles of hell or destruction, but one which also involves persistence, renewal, possibility. The River Sherbourne becomes a potent symbol of this more optimistic element: routed under the ring road, it eventually returns to the surface to join the Sowe and Avon. ‘Culverted under ring road,’ Galvin writes, ‘the river sinks beneath the streets / holds its breath,’ but ‘Sherbourne will not die’:

             The light will come – 
           this stream re-emerge; tunnels crack, 
           supporting towers collapse …
     – all must repeat – in rubble, nettle, willow, fern. 


About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, critic and lecturer. His books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012) and the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. 

Review by Jayne Stanton of "Rough Translation" by Cathy Galvin

Reviewer’s disclosure: No prior knowledge of the poet or her work.  A biography on the pamphlet’s back cover, however, lists her credentials as a journalist and a promoter of short fiction (Galvin is founder and director of the Word Factory) as well as a poet.  There’s also praise for a first pamphlet, Black and Blue, a ‘masterclass in poetic risk-taking.’ 

First impressions: Beneath the title on the front cover is a poem – or what appears to be a poem.  From the opening lines, ‘We stake a claim, lay foundations / build and watch it fall’ to the final ‘Our homes are built to go’ there’s a return of wilderness once ‘tamed, contained’ and a leaving of the land by its inhabitants.  Most intriguing of all is:

‘Take away it all
and what is left is who we are.’

What a novel way of grabbing the reader’s attention and inviting further reading between the black end papers of this slim volume.  The Contents page places the title poem midway through the pamphlet but, on exploring further, the reader is re-introduced to the cover-featured lines: they form section 3 of the third poem, ‘Walls.’ 

Rough Translation is the poet’s attempt, over time (these poems were written over a three-year period) to capture, in words, the essence of her people – the Connollys of Mason Island, Connemara – their way of life, and the familial and cultural roots that continue to draw the poet back.  

Throughout these poems, there are strong links between the land and the sea.  In ‘Kate Connolly,’ limpets are fuel for the fire and shells are ‘treasure to be broken,’ the harshness of island life necessitating the gathering of sea bounty.  In ‘On the Tide’, those born on the land leave by the sea.  The poem has a strong, wave-like rhythm; there is tension between land, sea and air, between waiting to go and parting.  And in ‘Cork’, there’s a raft to ‘carry/ his dead weight / across an ocean…or / burn bright / one the one for / the whale-road.’ 

Kate Connelly, the poet’s namesake, has gnarled black hands and a parting kiss of ‘sea, iron…’ yet it is ‘all we don’t understand,’ and ‘all we thought we would never be’ that engenders ‘the eighth sin – / fear.’  She ‘Smell[s] of earth, warm milk from the cow’ too, and, in ‘Naming’, there’s vulnerability as she ‘Stepped in to/ the ocean.   Shed shawl, / shape.  Fed on fish’ while her menfolk bury at sea ‘the cold babies,’ the ‘infants / never named.’  She, and they, are seals that ‘slick the under-swell/ of deep beneath the light,’ reminiscent of the opening poem where child and mother are seals ‘Beneath and above / the swell of birth.’  

In this pronoun-rich collection, Kate Connelly is the only named individual – and the lynch pin, it seems.  In reading back and forth between poems, it seems that all lead back to hers.  Is the subject of the title poem, living in a Midlands tower block where ‘Lifts bring us back / to you’ one of ‘her children,’ ‘freed…to stray beyond’ her ‘folds of wool wrapped round’ or the mother herself?  Is it Kate who is laid to rest ‘in red Coventry clay’ in the poem ‘Coventry Kids’?  The phrase ‘her Connemara moorings’ is telling; it underlines the precarious futures of those who live on islands such as this, taking the reader back to those walls without a roof, those ‘homes…built to go’ (in Walls) and, in Starlings, ‘cottages impossible / to sell; others let to the wealthy.’  

Galvin’s roots run deeper than laid foundations, though, and their pull is evident in many of the poems.  One of the most poignant is Borrowing Soil: the peat top-soil that ‘doesn’t belong,’ is ‘borrowed’ – another impermanence – ‘This earth/ so far from home.’  Home, for the poet, is found in a ‘going back to sources,’ of spoken language:

‘These are the sources that I seek.  Have yer tidied pots?
Have yer sidey’t table? Yes Mummy.  Yes Daddy.  Their voices
deeper than any soil.’

These poems are mysterious and sensual; truth is hard-won – ‘rough’ or inexact rather than invented – and therein lies a magic, of sorts.  Rough Translation is a distillation of lives and their legacy, Galvin’s poems giving voice to those ‘tongues stilled.’  Words are hooks and pins as the reader searches for a way in.  The poems invite and richly reward re-reading.


About the reviewer
Jayne Stanton is a teacher, tutor and folk musician living in Leicestershire.  Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online magazines and anthologies.  She has written commissions for Harborough museum, University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing, and has recently completed a poem sequence about life in Leicester as part of a city residency.  Her pamphlet, Beyond the Tune, is published by Soundswrite Press (2014).  
Jayne blogs at jaynestantonpoetry.wordpress.com and tweets @stantonjayne