For the 180th anniversary of An Gorta Mór’s commencement, Seang (Hungering) poignantly reclaims the human story behind the lost history of a group of rebel girls who were daughters of refugees from Ireland’s Great Famine. It seeks to restore voice to these girls and their families, who were silenced over and over during their lives, and who suffered destitution, discrimination, and intergenerational incarceration and hardships largely driven by colonial policies, attitudes and actions in Ireland and in their country of refuge, Australia. Incorporating award-winning research and poetry, Seang offers a beacon for the 473 million children in our world today who are impacted by conflict and extreme food insecurity driven by the same three factors—climate, politics and economics.
‘Seang is a work that reaches deeply into human suffering and trauma. Anne Casey’s material is harrowing, yet through compassion, through risk-taking, and the dazzling spell of poetry, this book brings us face-to-face with what we should never turn away from: the sinister effects of colonialism and the power structures that destabilise our abilities to act humanely. With these poems, Anne Casey brings dignity to those who have been brutalized and forgotten. The many layers in this book build to epic proportions, its rhythms and interrogations create unforgettable power. Seang reminds us that poetry expresses thought and feeling more lastingly than anything else.’
—Judith Beveridge
Poet, editor, academic, Prime Minister’s Poetry Prize winner
‘Anne Casey’s Seang (Hungering) is an elegant, multifaceted meditation on the privations meted out to the daughters of Irish famine immigrants to Australia, moving beyond the historical record to explore hunger as both a physical condition and a metaphysical punishment, inseparable in many cases from the condition of womanhood. Casey’s poised, lyrical poems are grounded in the body as the site of originary appetites and suffering, but also attuned to the spiritual hungers generated by separation from language, culture, place and family. Formally and tonally various, moving between the historical and the imagined, the known and the unknowable, Seang (Hungering) offers a searing archive of the female experience that is shot through everywhere with Casey’s sensitivity to the image, line and music. What impresses most is Casey’s sense of voice: by turns epistolary, documentary, confessional, rebellious and ardent, these poems speak to us across time and space, demanding and commanding our attention.’
—Professor Sarah Holland-Batt
Poet, academic, Prime Minister’s Literary Award winner
‘At the heart of Seang, Anne Casey’s searing new collection are journeys. This work, a rich, polyvocal, intertextual, and lyric documentary, calls to mind John Montague’s The Dead Kingdom and Michael Coady’s All Souls, both classic explorations of the Irish Diaspora. Seang is underlined by forced journeys endured by women and girls from Ireland to Australia in the wake of the Great Hunger, and by their subsequent journeys within New South Wales as they sought to gain footholds in an often hostile and inhospitable land. Aided by groundbreaking research and great literary skill, Anne Casey brings to vibrant life the experiences and desires of Eliza O’Brien (1851-1876), whose family hailed from Shanagolden in Co. Limerick, and of the many others who suffered in Australian industrial schools and prisons and who, until now, were silent. Seang is a furious, graceful, and deeply moving work of literary witness.’
—Professor Eamonn Wall
Poet, academic, Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies, University of Missouri-St Louis
Mise Aisling
After Eavan Boland’s ‘Mise Éire’
I lost my tongue
long ago in exile,
refound it in a ghost child
calling for her mother.
Elizabeth O’Brien casting off
to the deep: Bíonn súil le muir
ach ní bhíonn súil le tír—hope in the sea,
no hope in the land—as she clutches
her grizzling Eliza slipping away.
I am the girl who left, the woman who returns
always to this wild coast, to these deep-rooted cliffs,
Atlantic swells dashing against our haunted history,
to these bonefed boglands, this patchwork
street whose gaptoothed roofline
recalls my grandfather’s flight:
a child running through the frost-lit night—
the only home he’d ever known
ablaze in his wake, the dark cracking
over and over as neighbours fell
to the Black and Tans’ guns.
A chuisle, Elizabeth answers,
a breath on the wind and there
is Granda hoisting me high in his arms:
A chuisle into my hair—whispered always
whispered—welts still felt a lifetime later
for speaking our mother tongue.
Imeacht agus teacht: going and coming
from these cliffs, this sea, these streets,
these potter’s fields, this history
that made us. This is my story,
as it was yours, but not hers—
slipping away through the fog
filling the Shannon River’s gaping mouth,
clutching her sleeping Eliza, bound
for Australia—away from their grasping
landlord, away from the famine’s ravaging
aftermath, a hundred and nine days
on the unrelenting sea, a voyage
they would not both survive.
Imeacht gan teacht:
to leave but never arrive,
that long-feared Irish curse.
Is mise Aisling, is tusa Aisling, is Aisling í:
I am Aisling, you are Aisling, she is Aisling.
Idir Oispidéal Galair agus Teach na mBocht Púca beag in airde, scamall bog bán sáinnithe i mbarróg fholamh an chrainn gheimhriúil a’ casadh, ‘ casadh ar an ngaoth aniar aduaidh— a’ casadh, ‘ casadh, a’ glaoch sa ghaoth gan trua d’achainí gan freagra. Scréacha sna craobhacha, grága na bpréachán a’ baint macalla as do screadaíl chráite: Cá, cá, cá— cá bhfuil tú? A’ casadh, ‘ casadh: macalla na bpréachán a’ sníomh is a’ corraí faoi sholas geal-liath na spéire, galóg móna dóite fadálach san aer. Púca beag in airde, scamall bog bán ag tarraingt, ‘ tarraingt i gcoinne bharróg fholamh an chrainn gheimhriúil— a’ glaoch sa ghaoth gan trua d'achainí gan freagra: Cá, cá, cá— Cá bhfuil tú, a Mhamaí? Tar ar ais dom, a Mhamaí, tar ar ais. (Cill Rois, Luan Cásca 2022) | Between the Fever Hospital and the Poorhouse Little ghost on high, soft white cloud caught in the empty embrace of the wintering tree turning, turning on the northwesterly wind— turning, turning, calling on the bitter wind your unanswered entreaties. Screeches in the branches, cawing of the crows echoing your desolate cries: Cá, cá, cá— where, where, where are you? Turning, turning: echoes of the crows weaving and twisting in the silver light, a trace of turf-smoke lingering in the air. Little ghost on high, soft white cloud pulling, pulling against the empty embrace of the wintering tree— calling on the bitter wind your unanswered entreaties: Cá, cá, cá— Where, where, where are you Mammy? Come back for me Mammy, come back. (Kilrush, Easter Monday 2022) |
Small Change
For the 473 million Elizas still living in our world
My friend Luka says
it’s the day before yesterday.
He’s a wise guy,
Luka. He knows you can leap
off three hundred million years
of sheer raven-shaded shale tenacity
into millennia of relentless lace-edged teal
backwash to find a plumb core approaching
the divine, but he's not infallible—
if you were a Wollemi pine, say,
it’s five seconds ago, or a brain
coral polyp, maybe last Wednesday.
For a child in Sudan, it's today
and every day since the beginning of time
stretching in one long line until you die.
For your child or mine, maybe not
in their lifetime, but for their child maybe
it’s the day after tomorrow because
the house I lived in burned
to the ground as a reprisal by colonisers
in my grandfather's time and half
my country died or were exiled
because of politics, climate or a mistaken
belief that good people won't fail
to do something, which boils
down to numbers no matter
what time you make it.
My friend Luka can jump off a cliff if he likes
—into the same sea that swallowed a quarter
of a million of my kind, refugees dying—
but here's what I know: all our oceans
meet somewhere sometime, so what
are you going to do
with this one
precious
wild?
