Review: Ghost of the Fisher Cat reviewed for Sabotage Reviews by Grant Tabard
Galway-born Afric McGlinchey has been far and wide and I can smell the adventure in Ghost of the Fisher Cat. She grew up in Zambia, Limerick, Zimbabwe and South Africa, and lived briefly in London, Paris and Spain before returning to Ireland in 1999. Paris is very much the focus of this book: McGlinchey uses her own memories and expertly stitches them into the Parisian urban myth of The Street of the Fishing Cat.
La Rue du Chat qui Pêche is still the narrowest street in Paris. More than an oddly-named street, it is also the scene of a grim, centuries-old legend. The story goes that in the 15th century a certain Dom Perlet, a canon engaged in alchemy, lived on this very street, accompanied by his smart hyacinth black cat. A particularly gifted fisher, catching fish with one swipe of its mighty paw, the cat went prowling by the river quite often by itself. Convinced that both the alchemist and the black cat were the impersonation of the Devil, three local students agreed to kill the unfortunate mouser and throw it into the Seine. Curiously, once the cat died, the alchemist disappeared… only to reappear again a bit later, like a traveller coming back from a lengthy trip. As for the cat, it continued fishing peacefully by the banks of the river…
A fantastic story, I can see why the poet gravitated towards this grim tale. But McGlinchey doesn’t dwell in the sunken pit, she integrates light with the dark seamlessly. It’s all in the same universe of flooding starlight. Loss is bound up with love, and wonder entwined with tragedy. Her poems are beautiful to the core, almost otherworldly, hitting right in the solar plexus.
The collection is split into five distinct parts; Familiar, Slow Dancing in a Burning Room, Leavings, Cold Air Awakening and Particle of Light Through a Raindrop. ‘Cat Music’ is like a concerto for violin:
A drownling cat is lifted
from a rain barrel,
dark as a slick of oil,
stripped with a blade,
organs separated
from fat and manure,
soaked overnight
in alkaline water
I can hear the gulp of water from the rain barrel, feel the slopping fur dripping on the paving stones. Other more veiled poems waft soft dark lines, such as in ‘Night’s Three Faces’:
I
Cats compose the dark, wrapped
in the weight of night devilment.
They chew on a tale of a quay of flames,
fire-sister, mutable skies.
There is violence too, in the camber
of voices around the weight of indiscretions.
Cars reverse like a tongue.
A snake cloud. So much to hide.
Every night, the kingdom comes.
The poem ‘Fête des Trépassés’, perhaps my favourite, is a love song with a hint of Prufrock;
And now, my Héloïse?’ he asks, and she responds,
‘Men called me chaste. What a hungry hypocrite
I was. Come Pierre, unknot me!
Like Prufrock, it’s a strange love song, this time between the ghosts of those fated lovers, Abelard and Héloïse, skimming across Parisian lovers’ bridges. That’s followed by ‘A River of Familiars’, which wouldn’t look out of place in a George Szirtes collection. The poem is formed of fourteen couplets:
I have a penchant for jumping trains, inhaling
with each knock. I have a sister cat who inhales too.
McGlinchey’s stanza breaks are delicate but deliberate; her line endings too.
Throughout the collection, her voice is vibrant, conjuring an uncanny revenant. This is a lively yet introspective, supernatural collection. There is also a transcendental presence in her work – is she a visionary like Blake?
Ghost of the Fisher Cat is Afric McGlinchey’s second collection published by Salmon Press. It follows her much-acclaimed debut collection, The Lucky Star of Hidden Things, published in 2012, where we were treated there to a feast of the senses, but invited also into a vulnerable personal world of loss and upheaval and compassion. Like all good books in any genre, the strongest impression one was left with was the distinctiveness of the language, served in this case, by lightning quickness of thought and a canny hand in crafting dramatic and unlikely associations.
In her second collection, the poet goes even deeper. The dominant setting has moved from that of southern Africa to Paris and away also from the poet’s direct lived experience into the realms of the imagined. The Paris we move through is a historical and geographical hybrid.
A feature of her style is the enviable first line: “I have a cat that sharpens her scent on men…”, Even in cities,/there are places to be alone,/with drizzle and roses…”: “Near the estuary, silt xylophones/over shale and pebble…”; “Cats compose the dark…”, and “…imaginary balconies seek fifty poplars…”
A facet of Afric’s hand is the way she can achieve enigma through the use of crystal clear imagery; a kind of surreal imagism where the interplay of image and association confounds easy ascription. These works are deliberately puzzling iconostases to a guarded reality well worth the divining.
–John Fitzgerald (Winner of the Patrick Kavanagh award)
In her newest collection,
Ghost of the Fisher Cat, Afric McGlinchey has taken poetry to another level. Here, her poems are sequenced into a novella-like arrangement, grouped into sections where she has allowed characters and relationships to develop “[…] across a time-space continuum […]”.
The poet fits approximately ten poems of great variety into each one of her five sections. Beginning the collection with “Familiar”, she introduces the collection’s theme: the “[…] urban myth of a black cat and its apothecary owner, […] borders between the fantastical and the real blur […] from the ghostly to the hallucinatory. “
“Vital Impulse” opens with a quote by Matthew Hollis which gives a hint of the poem’s concerns: “I have a cat now. It comes in, it goes out.” The owner analyses and criticises her 'cat' – “It’s just that, in this state, / he’s unreachable,” and calls its existence into question “I could walk / right through him. / All matter is merely / image, after all.” She draws the conclusion that “The best approach / is an open door”, and we receive insight into the owner’s mind.
The first three sections each contain a poem sharing the section’s name. Consider an example – “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” in the second section; the perception of the surroundings melt, together with the first-person narrator’s imagination, leading to an intended confusion in reading. What is real and what is illusion? Is “the yellowwood floor” really “glowing” – or are those only the “footprints to a future memory”?
In the titular “Leavings” in the third section, the speaker again focuses on the surroundings while trying to find a “place to be alone”. The description of “ground sucking and squelching” creates an eerie atmosphere and demonstrates the speaker’s discomfort in that environment. This indisposition is further enhanced when there is “a lone dog sniffling at trees… / no, not alone after all.”
The section “Cold Air Awakening” adds the dead to the cast in this surreal set of poems. In “Flight MH370”, we are apparently witnessing a catastrophe “as the aeroplane hastens into radar darkness”. As readers, we are seeing these happenings and the people affected as if a camera-eye was moving us through the cabin: “Under that blanket, a boy / is counting time on his fingers. / A girl sleeps against / her mother’s unmoving / shoulder, while she soars away”. Death is not yet present; however, it might just be a matter of time because only a ”touch will keep him feeling / alive, until the last moment.” The mystery of when death will overcome the passengers lies in the imagination of the reader.
The fascination of the truth being blended and obscured with possible hallucinations, ghostly and mystical occurrences – all held together by the myth of the cat – threads through this entire collection. “Ghost of the Fisher Cat”, from the last section, “particle of light in a raindrop”, clearly states this collection’s intent: “It requires a certain leap of your own / to jump out of one world / and into another.”
Those words also decode the experience of reading this mystical and melodic collection.
Excerpt of review by Noel Williams for Orbis:
‘I like the way she can swing from realism to surrealism to pure fantasy, leaping from the literal to the allusive, from the mildly humorous to the deadly serious. It creates surprises in the individual poems as well as the collection as a whole, which takes real skill to get it right. She’s taking risks, and passing through worlds, bringing them together very effectively in a single volume. The work is also rich in cosmopolitan knowledge, which mostly adds a further dimension. The variety yet connectivity here, and the surprises which lie in wait for the alert reader, make this an unusual and successful collection.’
Despite the somewhat gruesome scene being described, the vowel sounds are delicious. This handling of language that turns something brutal into something beautiful is crystallised in the poem’s last lines, where the catgut instrument makes music that is “so intricate / and astonishing, / you would think / the animal had arisen”.
For someone (me) who would love to write a Paris poem (to write one well, that is), ‘Souvenir’ is a joy. Here is a city where one can “let fingers trail” along railings hung with love-padlocks on the Pont des Artes; here is the delicate “crêpe de sucre de citron”. This simple sequence of French words to describe what is basically a pancake suddenly seems as delicious as the thing itself. Likewise, the sound of what is probably an ordinary street, the “Rue de Chat qui Pêche”, is somehow mysterious and wonderful in this poet’s hands.
A little internet research reveals that this street is the scene of the myth from which Ghost of the Fisher Cat derives its title. The Rue de Chat qui Pêche is the narrowest street in Paris (maybe so not so ordinary, then) that leads down to the Seine. In the fifteenth century, some students were convinced that the apothecary’s enormous cat that fished expertly with one paw was the devil, and killed it—but the cat’s ghost returned to continue fishing from the riverbank.
In ‘Familiar’, a poem that expands further on the myth of the fisher cat, the speaker expresses fear and disgust towards Dom Perlet, the apothecary, and the cat that follows him like a familiar. The voice could be from any era in human history: it’s of one who fears the unknown, who would rather burn something strange than try to understand it. But McGlinchey can’t resist slipping some gorgeous language into the narrator’s description of the cat:
One of the things I enjoy most in poetry is when myths or stories are used as the writer’s starting point and then, through language and craft, become something unique that is entirely the poet’s own. McGlinchey performs this task with understated skill. Many poets have described many places, but it’s not often that on reading them I feel such a desire to visit these locations. Now I long to go to the Rue de Chat qui Pêche and see for myself its mural of a man and his black cat, which also provides the background for the book’s cover. (Sadly, a paragraph at the back of the book explains that the mural no longer exists.)
McGlinchey knows how to present images as a gift to the reader. Cats “compose the dark”; her lover “becomes a lion under the glassy moon”. ‘Confluence’ describes the nature of a distant relationship between two people in stark but beautiful images, recalling the works of Hammershøi. We can almost see the man against “the window’s blazing snap of light”, or the delicate hollow of the woman’s clavicle, like a wishbone, that “gives luck / only when broken”.
‘On Receiving a Letter from a Soldier after his Death’ convinced me that McGlinchey is as much a painter as a poet—it just so happens that her medium is words. There’s more than a hint of Vermeer in these lines: “Every window shows a body / moving. A man pours from a jug”. In this particular painting-poem, the colour of leaves on the street’s trees are the ‘milk-green’ of a corpse. The domesticity of “milk-green” recalls the “butter-yellow” of Eavan Boland’s kitchen window lighting up a suburban dusk in ‘This Moment’. Boland’s child running to its mother arms is also recalled in McGlinchey’s woman “[hastening] in the half-light / to a capsized child / beneath a swing”. And, like Boland, McGlinchey reveals to us these bittersweet currents that run like a river “rushing into trees” below every step we take in this world of dead soldiers and dead plants on a city balcony.
Any poem that takes its starting point from a quote of Homer Simpson’s is okay by me. “Young lady, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!” he shouts at Lisa when she invents a perpetual motion machine. That line will never fail to make me laugh. But then it’s a pleasure to read on to the love poem that the quote inspired—an outcome that that particular Simpsons episode’s writer surely never envisaged. As the narrator goes forward “into the big bang / of first love”, she finds that love is like landing “soft as a cat, / on a red-brick ledge, / among African violets”. The narrator’s breasts, in the hands of her lover, are “newly-found / planets”; the touch of him is enough to ensure that she burns “for decades”. What a simple, astonishing little piece.
McGlinchey knows both how to open a poem with lines that make you thirsty for more (“If I follow footprints to a future memory, / I find you”) as well as how to create a last verse that demands several re-readings, existing as it does both as an end to a poem and in its own luminous bubble. This is evident in the closing stanza of ‘Fin de Siecle’:
If I don’t quite know what these lines mean, their perfection is unimpeded. The imagery is surreal, the rhythm confidently measured; and the fact that these lines are used to end a poem that is called ‘Fin de Siecle' (End of the Century), hints at some significance beyond themselves—and what’s more, persuades the reader of the existence of that deeper meaning.
Towards the end of the collection, the titular poem provides something of an explanation of why McGlinchey writes, as well as how. A silver fish in the gutter may or may not be proof of the existence of the ghost of the fisher cat, but what matters is the way in which you decide to perceive it.
