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PRINT Catherine Gaffney Alice Kinsella The Americ
an author welled many of her beautifully wrought narratives from her own experiences. Lies Doireann Ní Ghríofa [Deadalus Pess ] Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters Lucia Berlin [Picador] Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s new bilingual collection, Lies, draws on her three Irish-language collections to date, Résheoid (2011); Dúlasair (2012) and Oighear (2017), and presents these Irish poems alongside Ní Ghríofa’s own English translations. Lies is a collection which deftly navigates the truth and the falsehoods which poetry and life can tell. The collection spans generations, from the personal; the poet’s grandmother and her own children, to the historical; Shackleton and the Aztecs. And from tinfoil to a mother’s grief to the Titanic, there is no subject too ambitious or too inconsequential for Ní Ghríofa’s stare. Her use of language throughout is delicate and musical, while also being knife-sharp and humorous – turns of phrase can be both gutpunching and witty at once. We get the sense of a poet equally at home in both languages, and though this is a book full of thrilling surprises, there is a natural rhythm and an internal rhyme in these poems that lets each word leap from the tongue. To write a collection as accomplished as this in one language would be an enormous achievement, but to write it in two proves Ní Ghíofa to be one of the most outstanding poets of our time. Lies is a collection to get lost in, to fall in love with, a book that reveals, again and again, the shifting, enigmatic power of language. AK Along with Evening in Paradise, this winter treats us to even more Lucia Berlin with Welcome Home, her memoir. The American author (1936–2004), like many artists, welled many of her beautifully wrought narratives from her own experiences. Whereas Evening in Paradise is a straightforward selection of Berlin’s short stories – located across the vastly ranging geographies and circumstances discernible from the details of her biography – this simultaneous publication, generously furnished with photographs and letters, offers us a more directly communicated rendition of her life’s events. Edited by her son, Jeff Berlin, this book reproduces, in its first section, the last version of the author’s memoir – the titular manuscript was sadly incomplete at the time of her death. It was, for the author, to be a series of remembrances of the many, many homes she had inhabited throughout her life, presented, as Jeff states in the book’s introduction, ‘in sequence and no longer masquerading as fiction.’ The last version of the manuscript ends in 1965, with an unfinished sentence. By the time the author reached the age of 29, however, there was plenty of life to recount. Her life-long, extensively nomadic existence had brought her from an adolescence in Chile to New Mexico, New York, and the bohemian enclaves of Mexican beach towns. This existence had also given her three marriages, of varying levels of turbulence, and four sons. If Berlin saw, as she indicated, her own written work as a portable domestic enclave, there was, of this time, certainly much to write home about. The memoir, being relatively short, occupies the first half of the book. ‘The Trouble with All the Houses I’ve Lived In’, a concise and humorously annotated list of the author’s widely dispersed residential history, provides an interval, of sorts. The second section presents ‘Selected Letters, 1944–65’. These were written during the events recounted in the first section. The majority consists of Berlin’s warm-hearted correspondence with friends Edward and Helen Dorn, and offers additional insight into tumultuous years that seem to have been by turns romantic, exciting, strained, and terrifying. The autobiographical accounts are generously integrated with photographs of the scenery, characters and structures so dazzlingly depicted in the author’s work. These images provide wonderful reference points, and their presence – and inevitable grayscale, until we reach the 1950s – in fact emphasises Berlin’s immense talent for communicating descriptive detail through language. Scenes from her ever-shifting childhood, which give credence to this reviewer’s belief that frequent relocations at an early age may enhance early episodic memory, are conveyed in expressive, painterly bursts: ‘Outside the back door the cream popped up from the milk bottles every morning. There was an ice storm and the trees sounded like shattering glass.’ Those already familiar with Berlin’s writing will be greatly rewarded by these texts, where equivalences with her short stories are easily detected, and the gaps between them hold even greater intrigue. Rich with the language and lifestyles of mid-20th century US bohemia, Welcome Home is warmly welcomed, indeed. CG 72