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By Andy Breckenridge

The Bone Folder by Cáit O’Neill McCullagh is a remarkable debut collection, dealing with subject matter as diverse as: war, family, a sense of community, the Irish diaspora and experiencing serious illness.

The voice is richly lyrical, inflected with language from the poet’s Irish heritage, and her home in the North East of Scotland, and we are rewarded with poetry that celebrates the resilience of the human imagination in surprising and moving ways.

O’Neill McCullagh has a background in archaeology – a role not unlike that of poet. The reader can sense a mind that is constantly sifting ideas, images and language to make unexpected and delightful discoveries. Hers is a poetic sensibility which is “excited by that act of noticing.” We are willing participants in this process, and in the questions these discoveries and noticings pose.

A bone folder is an implement that was used in the early days of bookbinding and so symbolises the recording of narratives, moments and experiences for posterity, as well what we leave behind in a corporeal sense.

This is evident in the opening poem, ‘The Charm of the Bones’. Their voice offers comfort:

Our Language is this: the dead / want you to live

This signposts the reader to the overarching themes of this collection in a way that immediately engages. Who are we and where are we from? How are we connected to the land and nature? Who are our forebears? What role does myth and narrative play in all of this? Has history overlooked us?

The central idea, of the redemptive and healing power of song, operates as a stand-in for poetry itself. The ending of the poem demonstrates the power of language to delight and provide comfort. The voice of the bones is placed on the wings of swans, but the concluding couplet qualifies this:

set / our ashes to the storm, that we / might turn the sun for you.

The storm is suggestive of challenges faced by the living, while the subjunctive ‘might’ hints either at serving the living, or perhaps only the possibility of being able to “turn the sun” for them.

The opening of the title poem strikingly juxtaposes the language of  cancer treatment: “Carboplatin” and “Pacitaxel” with images of a disturbed natural world: “unsklent eye of the hare” and “feart calf”. A calming of sorts arrives with a range of family artefacts. The woman in the poem uses a bone folder to organise them into a book, which acts as a metaphor for the creation of the book we are reading. The haibun form is used here to powerful effect, and the beautiful central haiku is worth quoting in full:

haunted, the hare springs

her winter skin: finds a form

in her own ghostings.

Usually a symbol of abundance in celtic mythology, here the hare is almost invisible. The reader is wonderfully wrongfooted by the first line break – not a powerful forward movement, but a kind of disappearance, suggesting scarcity, but also self-sufficiency.

At the online launch of The Bone Folder, O’Neill McCullagh quoted Roger Robinson’s idea that poems are “empathy machines”, which seems a fitting description for these generous and outward looking poems. Towards the start of the collection, six poems reach out to experiences of turmoil and displacement occasioned by the war in Ukraine, focusing on images from news reports and developing powerful mythic and symbolic parallels.

‘In Irpin’ depicts a devastated bridge as a dragon’s “throat”. The speaker sees an ibis, wade through a visceral “rip of ribs”. Or could this be a person picking their way across the river, picking their way ibis-like as they are forced to leave their home? Here both reader and speaker empathise with the fragility of the ibis/person, a delicate creature, almost erased by the whiteness of the snow:

I hold my hollowed belly close, wholly, / feart it will sunder should she drift.

The contrast here of the slain mythic beast and the delicate “ebb-waltzer” stands as a symbol of war’s brutal destruction and the vulnerability of human life and nature.

William Carlos Williams once stated there were, “No ideas but in things” and this is borne out in The Bone Folder. From deftly chosen specific details, ideas, symbols and mythic parallels emerge effortlessly. 

This is apparent in the sonnet,  My Uncle Wearing a Blue Beret, 1982. The voice contemplates their uncle in Lebanon with the UN, bringing in details such as “sand”, being “parched” and “a kiss / of ma’zaher scenting his lips”. In the second and third quatrain, we’re told about the “Milesians” who in mythology, made the opposite journey, conquering Ireland.

By setting her uncle’s experience against this backcloth, the scope widens powerfully,  implying that warfare is a constant state of human affairs – but when the focus returns in the final three lines to the speaker’s uncle, we are reminded that he dreams of being able to end the “rocket-brittle night” ( a stunning phrase) and is there as a peacekeeper, again described in telling, natural details:

all sheep gathered, each hairst reaped, / to cloud with starlings.

Another form employed by O’Neill McCullagh is the mirror poem. In ‘Curlew’ – “The cry of the curlew is said to be a call to souls wanting to be born, or an echo of the cries of a mother who has lost her child” [notes]. 

Here the speaker addresses the eponymous curlew in language that echoes the experience of pregnancy, and looks back in time: “my mothering, still within me.” The precision of the imagery here is quite breath-taking in how it presents the precious fragility of living things.

The curlew’s “heart would not fill a thimble” and later becomes a “hazelnut” – while the music in the phrase “you – milk-sweet, blood-warm unborn –” is intensely moving and reminiscent of Hopkins at his best. As the repetition of lines in reverse order begins, the speaker’s regret and longing for motherhood intensifies, by at once creating a sense of feeling trapped, while also reflecting a desire to turn back the clock.

The poem, ‘Irish’, is wonderfully and pithily titled, and tenderly depicts the speaker’s parents out dancing in London, having arrived “between destitution & diaspora.” We are invited to: “picture my parents staring from a crowd of faces; / driftmatter washed up” which hints at both the powerful economic imperatives that have caused them and many like them to leave Ireland, as well as the xenophobia faced in their adoptive city.

Both parents are described with warmth, in language worthy of Heaney: “My mother, / her marigold hair coiled like spooled dulse” associates her with nature and the sea while the ‘d’ alliteration brings a beautiful musicality. “My father, Brylcreem-sleek & sweet-handsome.” depicts the mid sixties with a tender sibilance and assonantal  ‘e’ sounds.

Despite the pejoratives of the father being called “Paddy! Mick!” they are able to resist; “foal-giddy” while dancing at the Roundhouse, a phrase that highlights them finding their feet in the metropolis while also finding joy in each other. This recurs at the end of the poem as they share a dinner of potato “planets” together, dipping them in an “unction of butter”, suggesting a precious, intimate and sacramental moment.

The poems in The Bone Folder do so many remarkable things. They yolk together seemingly disparate ideas to present new ways of looking at human experience; they confront the fragility of life straight on, resisting with an irrepressible and energetic creativity where myth, language and memory often conspire and join forces; they offer a range of skilfully executed poetic forms and superb choices of word and image, as well as rich musical phrasing. In short, we’re given a reading experience that is as impressive and moving as it is satisfying.

The Bone Folder by Cáit O’Neill McCullagh is available now from Drunk Muse Press.

Cáit will be reading at the St Mungo’s Mirrorball, Mirrorball Showcase on Friday, 8 November at the CCA, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. This is sure to be a popular event and early booking is advised.

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