Book review: Mary O’Malley’s 10th book of poetry is a masterpiece

Mary O’Malley is one of our finest living writers, someone who should long ago have achieved national treasure status. 

Her 10th collection,  The Shark Nursery, is a remarkable publication, even by her own exalted standards.

It’s fitting that The Shark Nursery opens with ‘Wolf Song’, a brilliant, beautiful poem written in memory of another giant of Irish literature — Eavan Boland. 

Indeed, it was Boland who said O’Malley is “a true artist in sketching the beautiful”. This is what she does in ‘Wolf Song’, a poem addressing many of the preoccupations long visible in O’Malley’s poetry.

In the first stanza, nature, in the form of near-mythic animals, is juxtaposed uneasily with human society: “a white leopard sits on a lawn in Suburbia” and “A wolf is walking along/an empty beach in California”. 

Soon though, we are reminded that we are here to mark the passing of a poet: “she too is becoming history… the first slow movement/of the strings is parting the silence”.

It’s impossible to read a poem like ‘Wolf Song’ and not think of WH Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, particularly: “The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests”. 

Such references to other artists (living and not) and historical or mythological figures occur frequently in O’Malley’s work.

As well as the allusions to Auden and Yeats, we meet the goddess Diana, Lorenzo De Medici, Paul Verlaine, and any number of Shakespeare characters. 

This is not showing off or name-dropping; each figure, each reference, is an essential element in this lyrical, elegant collection.

The book is divided into three sections with the middle section focused on the covid pandemic. 

There have been many attempts to address this subject through art but O’Malley brings a unique focus to the sheer strangeness of these years. 

The sequence of poems begins with ‘Another Plague Season’, where the poet can’t quite believe that this is really happening: “There’s no tension/and, like a bad actor, it will go on in fits and bursts”. 

Things move on to acceptance in ‘Late Swallow’ where the bird is described as a “winged Matisse, painting with Scissors” before the poet declaims: “Go. I need you in the square in Alcalá./This awful year I can’t follow.” 

The section closes with one of the book’s strongest poems, ‘The Lucky Ones’, commissioned for the occasion of the National Day of Remembrance and Reflection in March 2022. 

The quality of commissioned poems is notoriously varied but O’Malley rises to the occasion with some devastating lines:

“The poppies lasted all that summer… the dead rustled like leaves in the air”, closing on a bittersweet but hopeful note: “sitting at one another’s tables, the shades of our dead/hungrily joining the conversation, the days opening ahead.”

Some poems in the collection, such as ‘Medea’s Dreams’, ‘Shorts’, and ‘In the Dark’, must be given special mention for their excellence but ‘Lisbon Revisited’ stands out as one of the finest poems O’Malley has ever composed. 

All of her lyrical brilliance and capacity for creating unique, arresting imagery is on display:

“There were nights I hoped/the children would come/assemble themselves out of sun and roses… I would dance with them down Avenida da Liberdade,/the seeds of time in my hair”.

There are weak moments. ‘The Ballad of Googletown’, for instance, tries far too hard to be clever and relevant, but so what?

The Shark Nursery is a one-of-a-kind book, filled with achingly beautiful poems that show a true artist at her absolute peak.