‘Love, that Mammoth Thing’, the first section in Aideen Henry’s third collection, houses candid intimate poems describing loving family relationships, loss and grief, alongside the continuum of female sexuality from the threshold of fertility to long after it ends. The middle section, ‘Sway’, opens a window into the parallel world of Irish country dance, rich in its distinctive courting etiquette where traditional gender roles prevail. ‘Cut & Thrust’, the final section, contrasts the concrete medical aspects of the interior workings of the human body with the messiness of human emotion in the realm of contemporary romantic love.
'Aideen Henry’s A Bloodless Field is a wide-ranging collection brimming with insight and curiosity. From flirtations at a country dance, to the physical repercussions of grief, to a sequence of poems exploring the inner workings of the human body with medical precision, these are poems with a philosophical bent and a strong emotional core. A collection that demands to be read again and again.'
Jessica Traynor
I break horses, he says,
seated in my sanitized room
his green eyes glinting,
shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow,
taut stomach brimming over his belt,
his short thighs spread.
Only for as long as it takes,
two months or three.
‘… strewn with lines which are memorable because you’ve read nothing quite like them before… where others would inflate their language and bluster, Henry is clinical, she zooms in on childhood with a rare lack of sentiment. [Her poems] are unsettling in the way best poems always are, they drip with menace, loss and intelligence.’
Kevin Higgins
‘Henry’s unadorned style and sensibility; all the better for the quiet confidence … her unflinching and passionate depictions of sex, love and loss … sensual, explicit, funny and never less than 360-degree honest, these poems trace an aggregated arc through the modern love story… it is the matter-of-fact power of detail that so often carries the force of these poems and sets up dynamic resonance with the passionate candour and humour that is woven into the book.’
Martin Malone
A Bloodless Field
When you enter
an operating theatre,
your senses are tripped
by the change in light,
the change in smell.
A particular brightness,
all beams trained on the body.
You’d expect that.
The caustic scent of disinfectant
from walls, floor and gurney.
That too.
No surprise, the tang of iodine,
its bog-water tincture painted on skin,
as the scalpel lifts for its first cut.
Once blood is drawn,
another smell pervades;
that of burning human flesh.
As the tissues are cleaved
down to the target organ,
every vessel en route suffuses, bleeds.
Cautery seals
what the surgeon
most needs –
the starkness
of a bloodless field.
In Skin
‘Ultimately it is the desire, not the desired that we love.’
Nietzsche
Is it a relationship
if you’ve no contact by phone,
you’ve long gaps between texts.
If you don’t eat, drink or watch a screen together.
You don’t sleep over, he doesn’t walk you home.
If you are disdainful of his need for a text
once you’ve safely reached home.
If it could end after this time or this week –
you’ve given no promises, made no plans.
If you are wary of his suggestion to holiday together.
You hold hands only when away.
If you’re ecstatic to holiday solo,
as you watch adherent couples bicker and frost.
If in company his cheek brushes against yours,
a careful formality, but your eyes don’t linger.
If you prefer breakfast in bed, alone, toast crumbs
on your belly, a trickle of honey on your chin.
If in text he greets you by name and ends with his name,
like the warm dry handshake of a stranger,
though his fingertips, his lips,
must still smell of you, taste of you.
If you temper your texts, skim this surface like a skater
on water, fettered to the trivial, logistics for the next.
If your bodies open to each other with utter abandon,
more explorative and playful as there is nothing at stake.
If you don’t remind him of things he said
he would do and hasn’t or wouldn’t do and has.
If you give yourself the same freedom
and never explain.
If you buy a house, a car, celebrate a birthday
mourn a loss and tell him after or not at all.
And he you.
And he you.
If you delight in his shortcomings, rehearse
your incompatibilities, resolve to withhold secrets.
If you curb your instinct to draw in close, starve it of contact.
You don’t miss him, well, not for days, then only his touch.
If you’re relieved he doesn’t want more, after all,
you’re done with reaching, grasping, clinging.
You never want that again though he says he does.
His truth, which doesn’t feel real.
If you love how he chats on when you go quiet, his muscular hands
knead the air above you, give form to his words.
But you never say
or show.
If you are more at home in skin than in discourse.
You don’t talk about it.
After all, what’s there to say
that needs to be said?
Not Dead, Sleeping
At fifty eight I started HRT,
prince’s kiss to my sleeping womb,
long finished its lifetime cycle
of ripening, shedding, bleeding
– it reawakened.
My aging brain may have ceased
its monthly despatch of signals
for the womb to lay down
a lush scarlet bed
where an embryo might bloom.
Now each month HRT promises
the womb that embryo. It does not
reawaken my quiescent ovaries,
so no middle aged egg appears
rubbing its eyes, looking for its glasses.
Instead, month after month,
the womb ripens and sheds,
forever hopeful, forever ready to cradle a baby,
should that egg appear, should that egg meet sperm,
should the pair merge and flourish.
