The Beauty of the Moon

Described by Derek Mahon as a "singing voice for 'our dejected age'", The Beauty of the Moon is Anne Haverty's first collection of poems. The voice is personal, direct in its address, at once political and grounded in the everyday: "Look at her. A poignant lesson in revolutionary endeavour./On her old knees in frozen mud on the bank of the river" ("She Dreamed of a Washing Machine"). Sometimes preoccupied with loss, with what cannot be known about others-- especially, perhaps, with what a daughter cannot know about her mother: "Briefly, I am she./But what else she said, or really thought, is lost to me" ("Ladies Waiting Room, Thurles Station")--nevertheless, Haverty's poems find a way of speaking through, and of, literary and cultural experience. Sometimes, as in "To a Saint", she assumes a confident "we": "You reached out to us, a lonely princess/Wanting us as you suffered us, in the perfect dress." Elsewhere, the voice is individual, harsher--"Father, forgive me./I cannot of late/but see you as a terrorist." ("Our Father the Terrorist")--wit belying an anger, or shock, which makes itself felt through a number of the poems collected here, notably "Conversation, Unter den Linden". A various voice, then, and one that welcomes the reader. --Vicky Lebeau


Genre: General Fiction