The Bower

By Connie Voisine

How can a person come to understand wars and hatreds well enough to explain them truthfully to a child? The Bower engages this timeless and thorny question through a recounting of the poet-speaker’s year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with her young daughter. The speaker immerses herself in the history of Irish politics—including the sectarian conflict known as The Troubles—and gathers stories of a painful, divisive past from museum exhibits, newspapers, neighbors, friends, local musicians, and cabbies. Quietly meditative, brooding, and heart-wrenching, these poems place intimate moments between mother and daughter alongside images of nationalistic violence and the angers that underlie our daily interactions. A deep dive into sectarianism and forgiveness, this timely and nuanced book examines the many ways we are all implicated in the impulse to “protect our own” and asks how we manage the histories that divide us.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780226613819

Book preview

The Bower

The Bower

Connie Voisine

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-61378-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-61381-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226613819.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Voisine, Connie, author.

Title: The bower / Connie Voisine.

Other titles: Phoenix poets.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: Phoenix poets

Identifiers: LCCN 2018035073 | ISBN 9780226613789 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226613819 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS3622.O37 B69 2019 | DDC 811/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035073

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

I will build my love a bower

Near yon pure crystal fountain

And on it I will pile

All the flowers of the mountain

Wild Mountain Thyme, traditional folk ballad

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editors of the following magazines for printing the following poems, or versions thereof, sometimes under different titles:

Ambit no. 230 (2017): selections from The Bower

Ilanot Review (Winter 2018): selections from The Bower

Plume Anthology of Poetry 4 (2016): Easy for Me

Tinderbox 2, no. 6 (April 2016): A root of bane as Touch Me Not

There are many in Belfast who made us feel welcome and without whose generosity so much would have been much less. Thanks to the Ormeau Road crew: Eilish and Bernie Stocks; Dave and Kerry Cullen and their children, Eve, Molly, Nell, and Fin; Hazlett Keers and Kate McBrien; and the Ormeau Road Boxing Club. The writers who lunched: Frank Ormsby, Malachi O’Doherty, and Maureen Boyle. The welcoming Fergus Woods and Mary Durkin. The Fulbright organization, Queen’s University (Dr. Brian Caraher, who greeted us well), and the people who first went with us there: Jeffrey and Jennifer Thompson and family, Scott and Mary Bell Boltwood and family, Zev Trachtenberg and Tina Kambour and family. The Fulbrighters since: Erika Meitner, Tess Taylor, James Arthur, and Meg Tyler. Botanic Primary School, the wee school that gave our child friendship and an excellent education. Thanks for the good work of Katy Radford and Neil Jarman and family. The traditional music community that opened its doors: Martin and Christine Dowling, Melanie Houton, Connor Caldwell, Stevie Porter, Brendan O’Hare, Friday evenings at the Rose and Crown, and Síle Boylan and Gerry O’Connor and family. Oh, and more writers: Emma Must, Kathleen McCracken, Jan Carson, Leontia Flynn, Stephen Sexton, Stephen Connolly and Manuela Moser, Shelley Tracey, and Carrie Etter (across the North Sea via Illinois). John T. Davis, his love for Belfast and our Western desert. Thanks to No Alibis Bookstore—and David Torrans and Claudia Edelmann—you are the first place we go.

And thanks to the Yanks who love and keep me here, writers and friends: Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, Marianne Boruch, Robert Boswell, Karen Brennan, Richard Greenfield, Dana and Juniper Kroos, Antonya Nelson, Jacqueline Osherow, and the writers of Warren Wilson.

More than everything to my dearests, Rus and Alma.

The Bower

The summer before we packed for Belfast, my