Land of the Rock: Talamh an Carraig, Heather Nolan
Breakwater Books, 2022
In the first poem, “Mobile Bay,” Nolan speaks to the way in which her father is both drawn to, and repulsed by, the place where he was born. He asks his daughter, “what does a place mean/when they’re gone?” He tries to come to terms with the spectre of resettlement in Newfoundland, so that the poet writes “some of them didn’t leave/and here we are like cracked foundations/and here we are and/here we are.” In “Nolan’s Meadow,” the poet walks across the space where her family’s homestead used to live, looking for “some relic/to connect this place to you.” She only finds, though, piles of slate and bits of foundations where houses once stood. Place names are important in Land of the Rock: Talamh an Carraig, so tied to notions of both ‘home’ and ‘identity.’ In “Mistaken Point,” Nolan writes of a road trip with someone who is new to her: “we barely know each other and only meant/to drive to the trail in bay bulls.” By the end of the poem, by the end of that trip, the two have reached “the fields of rock at cappahayden” and have “run out of things to say.” They have been taken in by the landscape, so much so that the two “stare silent out across the Atlantic.” Sometimes, the poet is implying, even language—even speech—can be taken from your mind and mouth if the landscape impresses and overwhelms you.
Nolan has an adept facility with language, a keen ear that allows her to hear the cadences of Irish and English ancestry, place names, phrasings, and poetry. In “fogo island ferry,” she writes: “moonrise fabric/slippery deck.” On that island, stand on a cliff’s edge, “dare/the isolation to advance./failte go tilting. na mara./wave.” In “arriving,” she sees “irish flags,/rampaging in the wind” and signs all in Gaelic. There are stages and salt cod, the brightness of lichen on rock, and wind that “crashes/over the house/in waves.” Wind and rain figure into the Newfoundland poems. How could they not?
In the series of poems that populate the section titled “Sweet Bay,” Nolan marks the days. In “day 3—9:00am,” she documents an age-old process that was more common in years passed. “bill hoses gull shit off the splitting table,/hauls up gaping, pucker-lipped cod” and “feels for gills with numb sausage fingers,/turns them to fillets with two quick swings/of the knife.” The remnants “he leaves whole for his mother.” In “day 4—9:00am,” Nolan documents a walk home along the shore road. Here is a poet who can capture the moment, vividly document the experience in an embodied way: “waving off the fuss of flashlights, spinning,/face up, gulping the giddy mass/of stars. great bowl of them coming down/over me./flicking my head this way and that,/trying to catch their winking!” In “Day 9—9:30am,” she writes “the only difference/between/sea glass/and/garbage//is a jagged edge.”
Land of the Rock: Talamh An Carraig crosses the cold, deep water of the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland in the second part of the collection. In “Further,” there is a “search through names/on cracked celtic crosses/desperate for some substance of belonging.” Pondering the differences between Ireland and Newfoundland, the poet writes of how similar the music is, of how—in Temple Bar—“they’re just playing/the same old songs from home.” Here, too, is the ghost of the Famine, and of emigration when people probably didn’t really want to leave, of ancestors “leaving rotting crops to trace/the live of this river to a ship that would toss them to open/water.” These movements of cultures, of people, “a desperation in leaving solid/ground, in trading irishness—for what? for generations/peering back while accents slowly fade?” What joins them together, the ancestors and the landscapes, is the sea, the music, the language, and the culture of story. Beyond that, “in waterford listening,” Nolan notices “what speech patterns can tell us, how/these islands share a history of malnutrition.”
As you read, be sure to not skip over the footnotes, which are often both witty and poignant. A poem written in Irish Gaelic, the title of which translates into “we are not Canada,” carries a footnote that offers the reader the complete translation into English, so you’re made aware that—even if you have Irish heritage—you may not know, or speak, Irish Gaelic. I am biased in my review of this book because I have Irish ancestry on my mother’s side. The section of poems on The Burren makes me long to get back there, to put on my hiking boots and get out to Caherconnell with the light splitting the clouds. In “some field notes on the burren from afar,” Nolan captures the way the light is alive in the sky over The Burren, writing about how “sunlight crowns, a golden light winks/on the softness of limestone’s ragged face.” If you’re quiet enough inside—patient and still—you’ll learn that “landscape reveals itself slowly, like strata.”
If the ferry to Fogo Island opens the door to the geographic, linguistic, cultural, and liminal landscapes of Land of the Rock: Talamh An Carraig, then the poem about the ferry to Inis Oirr begins to close it, or at least bring it back around again to a return home to Canada. In this beautifully balanced collection, Heather Nolan considers the notion of how we come to meet our different ancestral stories, and then how we mine the past to find ourselves in the present places and spaces. For those of Irish descent, it’s an exploration of ideas that might haunt more than a few of us. Beyond that, though, Nolan’s collection roots you as a reader in geographical landscapes that echo one another, but encourages you to journey further, to consider how place and ancestry can influence identity, language, and story.
