The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman, Agnes Walsh
Breakwater Books, 2024
Admirers of Agnes Walsh’s Oderin (Pedlar Press, 2018) will be rightfully thrilled to read her newest book of poems, The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman. In this collection, Walsh once again weaves Irish and Newfoundland folklore into her work, including words and phrases that are common to Newfoundland specifically, and once again opens the door to let the sea into the ‘house’ of her poetry. Its presence is a constant, and the sea changes and rhythms that can be observed in the physical Atlantic ocean are mirrored in the humans who live on its shores.
Walsh contemplates what is ‘inside,’ versus what is ‘outside’ throughout this grouping of poems. In the poem that opens the book, “Seeing Nothing,” she writes of how the caribou move in a herd along the cape road, noting “the silence in their bodies” as “their ears twitch at the swirling snow,” and “the crows fly backwards/in the updraft of snow.” Opening the car window means that you let the other world in—that of the caribou—so that you “are only a thief in the night/stealing emptiness.” In “Tonight the River Is a Silver Thread,” the poet paints an image of the moon as it “slides out from the cloud/and throws itself into the river.” At that point, the speaker comes to the realization that “I am/pulled out of myself/and back into the world,/into the light of night.” The idea of feeling disconnected, as a human, is reinforced in “What Are We Trying for Here?” In a poetic nod to Mary Oliver, perhaps, Walsh reminds the reader that, “If you are stretched too thin with/your worry, think again how to look/upon the frozen river, how it is moving/just the same.” The end of the poem tips its hat to Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript,” in the lines: “Perhaps the universe will/catch us off guard,/give us grace.” In “I Walk Wanting to Hear,” the poet tells of how mindfully walking along a frozen path—in hearing “the echo/of the crackling frost,/of the singing water” is helpful in “calming the cacophony/inside my head.” She reminds us that we are small, and that our lives are so very transient. In our worries—and in the way we rush about mindlessly while we live out our often made-much-too-busy days—Walsh suggests that we need only observe the natural world more closely to get a sense of respite.
This lesson is reinforced in The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman when the poet writes about how it feels when your body rebels because of physical illness. In considering the scope of the sea, the weather, the landscape, and in the various creatures that populate air, land, and water, Walsh realizes “the grace I am given/by this clear day: [is] the chance to forget/the illness.” The poems that lead up to these cancer diagnosis poems reference fear, how it burrows deep into a person when they know that something feels ‘off’ with their health. “White Against White” names it, referencing a mammogram that finds “something,/not something discreet,/a definite small invasion.” The beauty of the fog that obscures—even for just a short time—comes with the moan of a foghorn and, again, the poet writes of finding a sense of comfort in the place itself: “This is still more beautiful than any life/you could have thought up.//This is what carries you away from yourself.” In poems like “And So,” “And So It Goes,” and “I Asked,” Walsh documents the shock of what new knowing feels like at point of medical diagnosis, and beyond. In “I Asked,” Walsh asks the doctor for a cause. The response is “It could be/the environment, genetics, modern love.” There are no certainties, and the reader is reminded that none of us have control of our lives; we can only manage how we respond to our challenges, upsets, and losses.
Faced with a frightening diagnosis, there is—almost magically—also the arrival of a new love. In “Clearing Out the Shed,” the poet writes of sharing a task that is usually tedious and takes up a great deal of time, but then ends the poem with a stanza that sings of joy and promise: “Later, we got tangled up/into each other’s arms and legs./Another snarl. But this one/we weren’t looking to untangle.” The tension and space between the place where you are ‘just friends’ to where something shifts into new love is so perfectly captured in “The Silence.” To me, it feels to be a perfect love poem, conjuring a road trip and a sense of being on the cusp of new beginnings: “Your right arm is out the open window,/your head thrown back on the headrest./It’s a warm August day.” The driver speculates on the happiness that is a tangible presence inside the car, and that is comfortably shared between the two people: “You’d say that being there is the real happiness./But I’d say you should see how happy,/how tranquil, your face is now.” Contemplating the ‘in between’ space before love is clearly spoken of, or made real by giving it voice, Walsh writes: “I say nothing. Except to myself./That I love everything that this is/and isn’t yet.” This is the sort of space that only a poem, or perhaps a photograph or painting, can capture, and Walsh does it brilliantly.
As in Walsh’s previous work, the ocean is something that is alive and omnipresent. The idea of what it is like to live on an island surrounded by water and weather is constant in The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman. In “Ocean,” the poet writes of wanting “the savagery of it all,” imagining herself “down in it./A little thrashing about,/but not drowning.” She assures the reader, then: “No, I’m not doing away with myself.” What’s needed, the poet tells the reader, is “the freedom of dive, of flight,/the ocean’s surging buoyancy,” to “cleanse myself in its salt and ice,” and then return to the shore’s “slippery, kelp-strewn rocks.” In “Seaweed on a Winter Beach,” Walsh writes of walking with her daughter, of how they “climbed up the seaweed,/mount after mound of pile-up./It was the middle of winter and February storms/tore the kept from the guts of the ocean,” as if they were “sea nymphs on dry land/claiming our kelp-hair,/our kelp-clothes.” They stretch their limbs to touch frost and snow, “stayed until the burning/of the cold set in./Until our sodden clothes threatened/to freeze us in place.” The seductive magnetism of the sea is present in several of Walsh’s poems, including “At Night the Sea,” when she writes of how the ocean is “all push and pull,/all force,/all solitude and sprawl./But utterly contained./Nothing to do with us,/yet its pull owns us.” An ocean, the poet says, is so deep that it “must hold such darkness.” It becomes, perhaps, a metaphor for what’s inside a person, further emphasizing Walsh’s poetic dance between internal and external spaces, and between past and present places.
The culture of Newfoundland, and of Ireland, is also a constant in this book of poems. In “Tain/Tain Bo Cuailnge” and “Seisiun,” for instance, the poet reaches back to the story of The Cattle Raid of Cooley, which is an epic tale in Irish mythology, and then conjures the beauty and power of a seisiun. Walsh alludes to the importance of very old tales in Irish culture, ancestral connections that tell her “keep on with it—/the old connection, the epics,/the cycles, the language,” and then speaks of how the sean nos style of singing calls to her, “pulls out of me,/as if an ancient voice/has a hold to/a thread in my chest/and every now and then/gives it a good tug,” so that she writes “And it isn’t me remembering./And I don’t know that ghost’s name.” Some things are not to be explained, but instead accepted as part of an unnameable inheritance.
There is so much to say about Agnes Walsh’s The Wind has Robbed the Legs off a Madwoman, from its creation of a world that is closely and very poetically seen and documented, to its vulnerability and power in engaging the ideas of mortality and continuity. The poems in this collection are tender, honest, and alive in their beauty, and everything is so well crafted. In the title poem, which comes at the very end of the book, Walsh writes of the image of a madwoman, someone who dances and spins wildly—woven into the cultural and geographical landscape of Newfoundland—asking her reader to consider whether they can imagine that woman hearing the music of heavenly bodies, and whether there might be “a madder music somewhere/that undoes us all.” What the poet leaves us with is the idea that this life—like the lives that have come and gone before this one we currently live—is something to be lived and danced passionately and welcomed despite all of its uncertain and often unruly complexities.
