Abstract

The poems in Small Fires trace a series of journeys, real and imagined, and seek to illustrate the stories that lie buried, both in landscapes and in human lives. The collection opens with a section of poems set on Inis Mór, a remote, Irish-speaking island off the west coast of County Galway, where the poet-as-speaker discovers the ways in which remnants of the island’s early Christian monastic culture brush up against island life in the 21st century. Also present is a series of poems set in the midi-Pyrenees and in the countryside around Lyon. Linked to the shorter poems in the collection by landscape, theme, and tone is a set of longer, narrative poems that give voice to imagined speakers who are, each in a different way, living on the margins. The first describes a young emigrant woman’s crossing from Ireland to Canada in the early 20th century, where she must sacrifice her tie to the land for the uncertain freedom of a journey by sea, while a second depicts the lives of silk workers living under oppressive conditions in Lyon in the 1830s. The collection concludes with a long poem written as a response to American writer Paul Monette’s autobiographical work Borrowed Time: An Aids Memoir.