Reviewed in Poetry Ireland Review

In her impressive debut collection The Palace of Bones, the young American poet Allison Eir Jenks makes notable use of an extended stay in Ireland (many of the poems in her collection were begun at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig) and a visit to the Louvre to mount just such a questioning of her own identity.

Her “Waiting” is a meditation on womanhood triggered by Kathy Prendergast’s sculpture of the same name presently on show in the Hugh Lane Gallery. The language of the opening is assertive:

“Who with a human soul wouldn’t notice / Three women against a wall with melted heads, / Dressed obediently...”, yet the poem also finds room to consider the women’s complicity in their situation: “you do not wait/ As martyrs or as ghosts, you are willing / To be chosen...”

In similar vein, the title poem refers to “that hurried visit made to the Louvre, / The ghosts of history confined / In one heavy album full of eyes.” In a startling conceit that refers to the Mona Lisa (“morach, token of womanhood”), Jenks notes how “Strangers crowded around her/Like the hanging of a witch.” Juxtaposed, in memory at least, is the portrait of a female martyr. But Jenks is not so much concerned here with presenting a feminist critique of western art per se. To an extent, she too is the voyeuse, “browsing blissfully / Into her glass for my own reflection.”

If it is true that, for the poet, “Even now these women trouble me, / Dancing like a string of pearls / That will never clasp...,” they are part of an entire nexus of experiences and relationships which are presented with both an enviable command of language and a deep emotional ambivalence.

With reference to her sister, in a poem entitled “The Little Red Schoolhouse,” there is a helpless anger in the imagery, and in the final enjambment of “Every nail I punch into the wall / To hang a pretty new painting / I wish I were nailing her back / To when she didn’t know Dad / Would leave and Mom go crazy;” while in a later poem, “Stained Dresses,” that deals with the mother’s old age, the absence of communication is highlighted by the rhetorical third person: “Does she pretend to have vanished / As I lift her heavy body from the bath?”

Poetry Ireland Review