Toward: Poems

By Moira Linehan

In her new collection, Toward, poet Moira Linehan makes us believe that landscape is destiny. As the book unfolds, we come to inhabit the land- and sea-scapes of the wild southwest of Ireland, the islands of America's Pacific Northwest, the poet's home in Massachusetts; and then round again, back to the land north of Dublin.

The poet's eye and imagination capture lyrical, sonic, imagistic details of these places. So, too, their embedded history: the Famine, the days of the whaling industry, the speaker's paternal genealogy, are all woven in.

But beyond those stories and images, the heart of this collection is the poet's missing lover--a presence haunting both landscape and memory. By means of crafting language and pushing its possibilities, the speaker searches for the most elemental in whatever place--physical or emotional--she finds herself.

As the literature of travel and especially pilgrimage shows, being on the move can become a journey to one's own interior. Here are poems of such witness, poems of reflection on how others on perpetual journeys have stayed the course. Here are poems about how this poet has come to places, as she says in her poem "In This Habitable Desert," she could not even imagine.

Toward brings the reader along with her to these places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Slant Books
• Release date: Jun 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781639820474

Moira Linehan

Moira Linehan is the author of If No Moon (2007) and Incarnate Grace (2015).

Book preview

ONE

WHERE THERE’S A HISTORY OF FAMINE

They’re always eating the grass.

One or two look up, startled, when I walk near.

They go on chewing.

Four o’clock one afternoon I hear a herder whistle.

His sheep come panting.

What does he have that they want?

Locals said it was coming,

the hurricane off Bermuda, turned this way.

All week winds had moaned.

Now screeching, they huddle round the cauldron of this cottage.

Through the night they howl.

The surf’s pounding’s drowned out.

Next day, the winds come off the cliffs.

They swell the waves, march them toward the West Cork hills.

The waves spume white froth.

Heavy, black-brimmed clouds follow after in endless parade.

I climb toward land’s end.

Winds won’t let me walk straight.

The sky’s clearing. I chance it.

I’ve not yet walked down to the abbey’s ruins.

Crows raise a ruckus,

flush a feather-thin pheasant with its hurrying trail of tail.

Only the well-fed

could find meat on those bones.

A famine’s reach—like this land.

Where the heavens lower their weight on dark clouds.

The bay and rain blur.

The horizon, a vast front for thousands of miles of sea.

Where those left built cairns

at the backs of their mouths.

SPIRIT SEEKING

That which each being lacks is infinite.

—Paul Claudel

The fingers of the bay’s containment, stone-bound land

thrust out into a sea with no other boundaries

in sight, that sea’s pounding blows, only whispers

of what roils below under a sky that can

threaten to drop torrents, then return with birdsong

after a night of bone-harrowing gales. The first

who journeyed to this edge had searched for such a place.

No, that was much later. First, before even coming

together—how ever many of them there were—before

saying one word, there was a wanting. Yet before

even putting that into words—see how far back

this goes?—there was a need. And that’s what’s driven me

to return to these desolate cliffs rising above

an ever-shifting bay. Led by the force of their need,

those who first hallowed this place of mist and stone

and wind heard the rocks themselves cry out. There’s never

silence. I’m with them, they with me in the spirit here

which can neither be created nor destroyed.

ENTERING THE CILL RIALAIG LANDSCAPE

where cliffs face a bay

bathed in perpetual grave gray. Even on days

with sun,