With photographs by Carmel Cleary
Hands Moving at the Speed of Falling Snow explores a spectrum of conflicting emotions that hold us in their power. Some poems meticulously describe people and their particular ways, the point of view of the child interwoven with that of the adult. Other poems show a view of damage as though viewed from inside a wound; they ...
ISBN
978-1-907056-31-4
Pub Date
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Cover Image
From 'Passage', a collection of photographs by the artist Carmel Cleary - www.artbycarmel.com
Hands Moving at the Speed of Falling Snow explores a spectrum of conflicting emotions that hold us in their power. Some poems meticulously describe people and their particular ways, the point of view of the child interwoven with that of the adult. Other poems show a view of damage as though viewed from inside a wound; they try to name the unnameable, speak the unspeakable, to make sense of the complexities of life when experienced acutely. Throughout the collection there is a palpable sense of multiple parallel realities which surface at intervals from the subterranean continuum of the unconscious mind. This gives a feeling of pause, of an imagination straining to leave the quiet bay for the pitch and roll of the open sea.
About the artist Born in Waterford, Carmel Cleary studied photography at the Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork. Since graduating in 1990 she has received many awards and was the first photographer to win the prestigious Alice Berger Hammerschlag Travel Award, which she used for this photographic tour of Utah & Arizona in 2000. www.artbycarmel.com
Aideen Henry lives in Galway and works as a writer and a physician. She completed an MA in Writing, was shortlisted for the Hennessy X.O. Literary Awards and the Francis McManus awards and she is a recipient of a literary bursary from the Irish Arts Council. Her collections of poetry, Hands Moving at the Speed of Falling Snow and Slow Bruise were published by Salmon Poetry. Her collection of short stories, Hugging Thistles, was published by Arlen House. Her work has been published in the Irish Times and broadcast on RTE Radio 1.
Poetry Class
I don't want to sneak into your polite workshop,
sit on the edge of my seat with averted eyes,
whisper my incy mincy lines in the approved metre,
or scratch around optimistically for praise.
I'll kick out the chair from under your iambic pentameter,
rip free your expectations, fling them to the wind,
drag your emotions screaming on a wild goose chase,
then leave them for dead, as I torch the building.
The House of Forgotten Things
A Virgin Mary blue and white house,
on the road west of Dingle, reminded
passers to buy what they had forgotten.
What if you could drop off what you needed to forget?
Forgotten people in the upstairs rooms,
forgotten dreams, damp on the line in the back kitchen,
forgotten promises kicking the mattresses from under the beds,
and forgotten lovemaking tossing sheets and blankets each night.
Would the store of memories and passions reach a threshold,
and self-ignited, take the roof off the house?
Review: by Kevin Higgins, The Galway Advertiser, Thursday 2nd September 2010
Hands Moving at the Speed of Falling Snow (Salmon Poetry) is the imaginative title of the debut collection by Galway native Aideen Henry.
Salmon has a reputation for producing stylish books but here, Salmon exceeds even its own usual high standards. The colour photographs by Carmel Cleary, arranged throughout the book's 10 sections, have an intriguing beauty.
I first met Aideen Henry when she joined one of the poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre four years ago. Bad poets tend to mistake constructive criticism for personal attack; Aideen always knew that feedback from others is a poet's best friend when it comes to making each poem the best it can be.
The result is a collection of poetry with hardly a superfluous word. Its pages are strewn with lines which are memorable because you've read nothing quite like them before; such as the first two lines of 'Buttress': 'I wonder how the bed feels/about having me all to itself', or the opening of 'Parental Guidance (PG)': 'What happens if there is a bomb in your belly,/Mommy?'
Where others would inflate their language, and bluster; Henry is clinical. In 'Kissing Cousins' she zooms in on childhood with a rare lack of sentiment. 'Over And Back', 'On The Couch', 'Hairshirt', and 'Femme Fatale Speaks' are unsettling in the way the best poems always are.
They drip with menace and loss and intelligence and confirm that Aideen Henry has no more emerging to do as poet. She has arrived.
