Molly Twomey: 'Raised Among Vultures'

The cover of Molly Twomey’s début collection from Gallery Press at first seems soothing: in its restrained colours, Diarmuid Breen’s oil painting presents us with a girl on a sofa quietly reading. But in front of her, dominating the right-hand side, is a large plant, uncontained and faintly threatening, and behind her on the sofa is her own lurking shadow. And then above the image is the ferocious title. What awaits this fragile girl, unaware in her innocence of the darkness to come?

From the first poem, ‘Risk’, we are thrown straight into a world where the body is under threat during ‘the flames of my worst years’.

All I want is to be shot

   into the air by a starship,

thrown far from waiting rooms, gurneys

    and supervised toilet trips.

She is in a hospital, and in the next poem, ‘The Drop Off’, she is being driven to The Centre, probably for an eating disorder. The body is everywhere in the book: oestrogen, skin, bone, cornea, flesh, muscle, adipose. Escaping it is as impossible as being shot into the air by a starship. Even late in the collection, where a new gentle love has come into her life, 

There will always be this part of me

that wants to dress

in my old leotard of bone.

Molly Twomey attends to the pain which underlies this collection calmly, looking it at it full-on in a raw present tense. There is the pain of the disorder, but also what I found particularly moving is her attention to the pain her family felt. ‘The Drop Off’ (the familiar innocent phrase about leaving a child to school) is a devastating heartbreaker in the portrait of the bewildered father who is doing his best to help his daughter:

You read the road as if it’s encrypted 

With what a father should say on a drive like this

and the apology in her head is

That I’m not as happy as you raised me to be.

All he can do to protect her is offer his good umbrella before the nurse tells him that it is best he does not return for a visit. ‘The Drop Off’ has an echo in ‘Dead Ends’: her mother in earlier years would also drop her off to the nightclub but never collect her, and so never saw broken shards / of Heineken bottles in my cheek, /screaming matches at the chip van / where tyres got slashed and taxis refused. Over the page in ‘Zipping up my Mother’s Dress’ she tries to cope with her mother’s desire to be slim:

How can almost losing me not be enough to kill

Her desire to be small?

She pays for the dress her mother has chosen, and tears off the tag

So she never knows the price.

Her mother, her father, her family, and her readers now know the price Molly Twomey paid, in this collection of dead honest and beautifully-achieved poems. By the end there is a sense of recovery and of letting light back in (‘Hiding’). The last poem in the book, ‘Kinsale’, ends with an image of possibility, and I think of another Gallery Press author, the late Derek Mahon, and his poem of the same name. How cheering is it that a poet from a much younger generation can fashion such accomplishment out of the fast and brutal machine of her heart.