Catherine Phil MacCarthy: Poet and Writer

This Hour of the Tide - Reviews

The Irish Times

May 21, 1994, CITY EDITION

Glimpses of awakenings
By DAVID WHEATLEY

This Hour of the Tide by Catherine Phil MacCarthy Salmon 87pp, Pounds 5.99

In “Barley Sugar” the opening poem of Catherine Phil MacCarthy's collection This Hour of the Tide, with its cowslip picking author straggling home

late for breakfast,
pinafore laced wet
to greet my father
outside our backdoor
with eggs in his upturned hat.

the sureness of touch is immediately recognisable. It is no faint praise to say that, almost to poem, this collection achieves exactly what it sets out to. In "Killing the Bird", "Sweet Afton", and "The Thrush's Nest", for instance, there is the sharply focused vignette of rural childhood life; in "Stone Circle", "Making Hay”, "New Moon", finely understated lyrics of awakening and awoken sexual life; in "Anaconda", a refreshingly self-effacing stab at that tiredest of genres, the picture poem; and in a more ambitious lyric such as "The Opal", the unexpected translation, as Eavan Boland has gratefully acknowledged, of the smallest external stimulus into "a foreground of human feeling and human threat". Here are the final eight lines from "Making Hay":

Beneath my palm your chest is
fur, then silk
stops at the fragrance

of hay, fresh cut,
falling evenly from
the blade behind the horse,
ripe seeds not yet
surrendered to the earth.

The success of this poetry, here as elsewhere, is primarily a matter of creative tact, of finding the right words to allow the experience to speak for itself without poetic heightening of any sort. If the final nine poem sequence, "The Crossing" does not quite come off, it is perhaps for this very reason; however individually successful, its component parts seem too little convinced of their larger destiny to gel into the dramatic unity of a sequence proper. In the same way, This Hour of the Tide, viewed as a whole, contains no obvious bravura pieces, or tours de force; how incongruous the very idea seems in discussing MacCarthy's work is symptomatic of the strengths and weaknesses alike of this, promising first collection.

WEEKEND SUPPLEMENT; Pg: Supplement page 9

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The Irish Times

April 8th, 1994

Reader's Choice
Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland, poet, member of the Board of the Arts Council; her latest collection, In a Time of Violence, has just been published:

This Hour of the Tide (Salmon/Poolbeg, £5.99), by Catherine Phil MacCarthy, is not just a book that I'm reading, it's one I'll return to. The poems are fresh, definite snapshots of very elusive feelings. What's more they give access to the subject without compromising its intent - something any poet finds hard to do. There are poems in it about schooldays, seasons and some wonderful ways in which the countryside is evoked through memory and regret. It is the work of a very gifted, very interesting and new Irish poet.

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