Customer Reviews

I should have given them water

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The first thing that struck me about Eileen Malone's poetry was how palpable it is - here is a poet who attends to all the pleasures of the senses, giving the reader an experience of the worlds of her poems that is full of sights, sounds, and smells. The language itself is just as rich, with a subtle music woven throughout. And she is also gifted with a fine eye for sketching character (witness, for instance, the way the sense of smell powerfully reveals the yearning of the young huffer in "This One Hit, This Sniff.")

Malone is unafraid to wrestle with big concepts, like faith and grace and wonder, but she never lets her attention stray from the specific, the concrete and the embodied. It is the sensual world and the body that become precisely the instruments of mystery and faith - whether the example be a bee drinking the last bit of nectar on a peach pit ("Peach Pit") or a woman turning herself over to chemically-induced oblivion (in the startlingly empathetic opening poem "More Like Angels.") In one of my particular favourites, "Bougainvillea," she explores the divide between abstract belief and embodied faith in the conversation between a priest and the poem's elderly speaker. The priest "offers salvation/ warns if I don't believe in his god, then I must/ alternatively believe in another god, or in no god [...]" and the speaker counters with: "I believe I would love a stiff gin and tonic/ or two, to help me settle into a sun-warmed, gentle sleep[.]" That is just one of the many moments, in the course of reading this fine collection, where I stopped to savour the language, the disarming humour, and the mind behind them. I'm confident in saying that you will most certainly find yourself doing the same.

This is a book that not only invites rereadings - it rewards them. (Incidentally, I also had the pleasure of encountering Malone's work initially by hearing her read it & I encourage anyone who has the opportunity to hear her to go.)

I picked up this book after hearing Eileen Malone author read from it -- and am I glad i did. Poem after poem in this volume lopped the top of my head off. These poems are full of gorgeous darkness and soft light. They are mystical and, at the same time, immersed in this world. One moment the reader catches a glimpse of a Fra Angelico angel wing and in another a large man with "an Easter Island head." Animals, children, and homeless men and women are Malone's spiritual messengers as they appear in gardens, city streets, public bathrooms, canyons and wharves, all struggling in various degrees of relationship and deterioration.

The first two poems of the book powerfully illustrate the fusion of the mystical and the totally-down-to-earth qualities of Malone's poetr. The first, "More Like Angels," is set in a public restroom "aspirin white ... where the scent of pine is denser than that of urine ." It doesn't get much more down to earth than that. In the second poem, "What It is to Gamble," the reader is ushered into a church gulping "air aromatic with frankincense [and] snuffed candles." In the public restroom we encounter "crack-addled prostitutes" and others, more like angels. In church, we join the holy crapshooter who knows "on the first roll of the dice, nothing is required of me and then everything."

Malone's language is richly evocative throughout. For example, a canyon "powders us with a fine dust of dried menstrual blood." Other examples: "she slashes the cataract of heaven's eye;" hair "the color of rotting hay;" and "the night continues to speak in tongues above our heads, chitters and snaps and cracklings clamor the syllables." I could go on and on.

I am putting "I Should Have Given Them Water" on a select place on my bookshelf with a few books of poetry I will return to again and again. I highly recommend it.