‘One of the true outstanding figures of the Irish Outrider Troubadour tradition'
Launched in London on 12th July 2023 — Dónall Dempsey's new collection
THE FOX, THE WHALE AND THE WARDROBE
THE FOX, THE WHALE AND THE WARDROBE
The Fox, the Whale and the Wardrobe by Dónall Dempsey. £10.99. Vole Books. ISBN: 978-1-913329-80-3
reviewed by Sue Kindon in The High Window
Now, there's a title that's asking to be noticed. Immediately, the CS Lewis children's book springs to mind (and I can just reach my tattered copy from where I'm writing), the Lion and Witch transformed to Fox and Whale. Already I find myself in the parallel land of childhood and fairytales, open to fantastic (in the true sense of the word) possibilities.
I make straight for the title poem, on page 21 (of 119). It's a poem of darkness, and there is no magic way out of this wardrobe, where a boy is hiding, in the company of his aunt's fox stole, its 'beady eyes alive with death', together with her whale bone corset: 'its white bones escaping / poking me in the ribs'. The fox stole whispers in his ear, and the poet tries to comfort the child he was.'I gather the darkness /about us', the poem concludes.
There is a reference to 'deepest darkest Cork': if the poet's name was not clue enough to his origins, this is the confirmation, and immediately his words take on a soft Irish lilt.
The volume is dedicated to Uncle Mikey: 'the treasure trove of my childhood', says Dempsey at the beginning of the book. The spirit of Uncle Mikey presides, and the final poem, 'Ever Ever Land', rounds off by describing the same uncle as:
a magician
making words do
whatever he told them to.
There are endearing poems about Dempsey's young daughter, who shows a delightfully original take on the world, several about his father, and mention of another uncle, Uncle Seanie. Other characters include James Joyce and family, and Jane Butler, a strange gangster/femme fatale, almost a figure from a graphic novel, or, perhaps, 'film noir'. The connection between photographs and memory also comes into play.
There is much juggling with time and memory from the outset. In the opener, 'Time Ever', Dempsey declares:
I always
nostalgic
for the future
as if it were
only the past
happening again
and again
for the first time
ever
...and this enables him to drift seamlessly in and out of childhood at will. He returns to a now-ruined house in the beautifully described dream poem 'A Further Future':
the house
looked aghast
at my return
- a poem with a surprising ending, and explanatory footnote.
Some of the notes at the bottom of the pages are like the introductions at a performance (and these pieces are eminently suited to live readings) , while others are little enigmatic poems in themselves, or, sometimes, jokes.
Indeed, the speaker of these poems can be dazzlingly light-hearted, successfully putting across the sheer fun of childhood, as in 'Be De Holy Dublin', another poem about Uncle Mikey. He (the poet) conveys moments that have been of huge significance in forming his own mythology. 'The Tree Walks Home with Me', for example, becomes part of the poet's dreamscape of trees, smiles, darkness and moonlight.
His take on religion is pantheistic:
no God just
the sweet rain blesses me
with its own good self
and his attitude to Christianity is not without humour. In: 'Fallen Angel on the Graveyard Shift' a stone angel gets her revenge during a snowstorm.
Dempsey's style veers towards the minimalist, with only a few words to a line, and, usually, no more than three lines to a stanza. This compact structure is carried by its own pulse, with hardly a need for punctuation. The wide margins of white space enhance the columns of well-chosen words, tall story upon story, colourful character after character. Incidentally, this is the first time I've reviewed from a pdf, and I found that scrolling down suited the shape of the poems very well.
The style is very much Dempsey's own, but the mood reminds me of Billy Collins, Lewis Carroll, and, occasionally, Spike Milligan! There are new fables in the making; 'The Tales Told by Birds' is a powerful take on the consequences of our destruction of the Planet:
the civilisation of the birds
will prevail
and they will tell their eggs
stories about how
the humans
nearly destroyed the earth
and how now they only survive
in the stories that birds tell
to frighten their little hatchlings
and: 'Beware the Dónall Dempsey My Son' turns convention on its head..
There are nods to, among others, T S Eliot, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, and Dylan Thomas.
The titles work pleasingly hard – for example, 'The Bell Goes for the End of History', and 'Moving House' - and can be downright funny: 'My Molecules are Revolting', or intriguing, as in 'Ball goes AWOL'. Dempsey loves to personify inanimate objects, and in this poem, both ball and wall speak, in a memorable fun moment.
Sometimes he personifies abstract nouns: we experience 'TIME running / in fear of its life', while being chased by a grandfather clock, and the poet even gives concepts voices. The Past speaks to us! This is amusing in its absurdity, and the direct address is bizarrely captivating. There is a real sense of whatever next?
Taken as a whole, the collection is a celebration of memory, family, and moments of intense emotion, happy or fearful, that will stay with me; all this recounted succinctly, by a masterful storyteller, in a series of enchanting vignettes. To give the poet the last word:
Only I
& the moment
keep happening
in the attic of my head.
Sue Kindon lives and writes in the French Pyrenees, and is a member of Treignac Poets. She was Runner Up in the 2021 Ginkgo Prize (for Eco-poetry); her latest pamphlet is Outside, the Box (4Word Press, 2019).
reviewed by Sue Kindon in The High Window
Now, there's a title that's asking to be noticed. Immediately, the CS Lewis children's book springs to mind (and I can just reach my tattered copy from where I'm writing), the Lion and Witch transformed to Fox and Whale. Already I find myself in the parallel land of childhood and fairytales, open to fantastic (in the true sense of the word) possibilities.
I make straight for the title poem, on page 21 (of 119). It's a poem of darkness, and there is no magic way out of this wardrobe, where a boy is hiding, in the company of his aunt's fox stole, its 'beady eyes alive with death', together with her whale bone corset: 'its white bones escaping / poking me in the ribs'. The fox stole whispers in his ear, and the poet tries to comfort the child he was.'I gather the darkness /about us', the poem concludes.
There is a reference to 'deepest darkest Cork': if the poet's name was not clue enough to his origins, this is the confirmation, and immediately his words take on a soft Irish lilt.
The volume is dedicated to Uncle Mikey: 'the treasure trove of my childhood', says Dempsey at the beginning of the book. The spirit of Uncle Mikey presides, and the final poem, 'Ever Ever Land', rounds off by describing the same uncle as:
a magician
making words do
whatever he told them to.
There are endearing poems about Dempsey's young daughter, who shows a delightfully original take on the world, several about his father, and mention of another uncle, Uncle Seanie. Other characters include James Joyce and family, and Jane Butler, a strange gangster/femme fatale, almost a figure from a graphic novel, or, perhaps, 'film noir'. The connection between photographs and memory also comes into play.
There is much juggling with time and memory from the outset. In the opener, 'Time Ever', Dempsey declares:
I always
nostalgic
for the future
as if it were
only the past
happening again
and again
for the first time
ever
...and this enables him to drift seamlessly in and out of childhood at will. He returns to a now-ruined house in the beautifully described dream poem 'A Further Future':
the house
looked aghast
at my return
- a poem with a surprising ending, and explanatory footnote.
Some of the notes at the bottom of the pages are like the introductions at a performance (and these pieces are eminently suited to live readings) , while others are little enigmatic poems in themselves, or, sometimes, jokes.
Indeed, the speaker of these poems can be dazzlingly light-hearted, successfully putting across the sheer fun of childhood, as in 'Be De Holy Dublin', another poem about Uncle Mikey. He (the poet) conveys moments that have been of huge significance in forming his own mythology. 'The Tree Walks Home with Me', for example, becomes part of the poet's dreamscape of trees, smiles, darkness and moonlight.
His take on religion is pantheistic:
no God just
the sweet rain blesses me
with its own good self
and his attitude to Christianity is not without humour. In: 'Fallen Angel on the Graveyard Shift' a stone angel gets her revenge during a snowstorm.
Dempsey's style veers towards the minimalist, with only a few words to a line, and, usually, no more than three lines to a stanza. This compact structure is carried by its own pulse, with hardly a need for punctuation. The wide margins of white space enhance the columns of well-chosen words, tall story upon story, colourful character after character. Incidentally, this is the first time I've reviewed from a pdf, and I found that scrolling down suited the shape of the poems very well.
The style is very much Dempsey's own, but the mood reminds me of Billy Collins, Lewis Carroll, and, occasionally, Spike Milligan! There are new fables in the making; 'The Tales Told by Birds' is a powerful take on the consequences of our destruction of the Planet:
the civilisation of the birds
will prevail
and they will tell their eggs
stories about how
the humans
nearly destroyed the earth
and how now they only survive
in the stories that birds tell
to frighten their little hatchlings
and: 'Beware the Dónall Dempsey My Son' turns convention on its head..
There are nods to, among others, T S Eliot, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, and Dylan Thomas.
The titles work pleasingly hard – for example, 'The Bell Goes for the End of History', and 'Moving House' - and can be downright funny: 'My Molecules are Revolting', or intriguing, as in 'Ball goes AWOL'. Dempsey loves to personify inanimate objects, and in this poem, both ball and wall speak, in a memorable fun moment.
Sometimes he personifies abstract nouns: we experience 'TIME running / in fear of its life', while being chased by a grandfather clock, and the poet even gives concepts voices. The Past speaks to us! This is amusing in its absurdity, and the direct address is bizarrely captivating. There is a real sense of whatever next?
Taken as a whole, the collection is a celebration of memory, family, and moments of intense emotion, happy or fearful, that will stay with me; all this recounted succinctly, by a masterful storyteller, in a series of enchanting vignettes. To give the poet the last word:
Only I
& the moment
keep happening
in the attic of my head.
Sue Kindon lives and writes in the French Pyrenees, and is a member of Treignac Poets. She was Runner Up in the 2021 Ginkgo Prize (for Eco-poetry); her latest pamphlet is Outside, the Box (4Word Press, 2019).
"This morning I finished reading your anthology The Fox the Whale and the Wardrobe. I enjoyed this collection of poems immensely.... I think you write in an unselfconscious and direct way which does justice to the experiences or emotions the poems contain. I think the language of the poems is imaginative and often playful, occasionally surrealist too. Your poems made me laugh, feel sad and reflect. This for me is what art is about." – Owen Ostler (a buyer of the book)
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ISBN 978-1-913329-80-3
148 x 210mm, french flaps, 120 pages VOLE Books, RRP £10.99 We regret that we can't send books outside the UK so THIS PAYPAL BUTTON IS FOR UK ORDERS ONLY. If we receive international orders through this button, we regret that we have to deduct the Paypal handling charge from a refund (about 10%).
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In Dónall Dempsey’s sixth collection, published in 2023, he continues to explore themes of time and memory in poems that are playful, emotive, absurd, surreal, funny and moving.
Kathryn Southworth, reviewing in Sofia Literary Journal, writes:
'This collection, Dónall Dempsey’s sixth, is dedicated to “my Uncle Mikey, the treasure trove of my childhood” and, indeed, Irish childhood is a magical resource for the poet’s whimsical delight in language, people and performance. The title poem exemplifies the range of reference and emotion which can be achieved in simple narrative forms drawing on richly textured objects and events, narratives which evoke literary analogues, in this case C.S.Lewis, whilst asking fundamental metaphysical questions. The poem is addressed to his child sister, dead in a tragic accident, from which the poet hides in a wardrobe which is both literal, with his auntie’s fox stole and whale bone corset “smelling evilly of pink plastic”, and metaphorically a retreat from life where he can “Gather the darkness/about me/Dissolve into/the nothingness/I have/become”. This childhood loss haunts him and gathers memories of all “darkness”, against which the 67 year old man he has become seeks to comfort and make amends to the nine year old he was. An aspect of the “amends” is the poet’s ability to write the past, evoking its formative power with joy and ensuring it endures as what, in the final poem, he calls “Ever ever land”. All happiness may exist in “little snippets of time/and space”, as he puts it in the penultimate poem and even if the protagonists remain only in black and white photographs, “I/& the moment/keep happening/in the attic of my head”. Grief, then, is juxtaposed with celebration of life, love and moments of joy. Dempsey is not a believer in the comforts of religion: “the bell tolls/putting everything back in place/for those with faith/me, I /think the wind and crows/speak the truth” but that is not a cause for despondency”: there may be no God but “just/the sweet rain blesses me/with its good self” and a robin “unaware/that he’s my prayer”. Above all, people like his father are “the only religion/I could believe in”. “I pray to him”, the poet says in “Go Gentle”. At the other end of life is the three year old child Tilly, a source of joy and wisdom. In “Coming back to the world”, for instance, she wakes up sobbing that she fell asleep and potentially missed out on something happening. Comforted that the world, too, fell asleep, she snuffles “Good/I hate to miss/anything the world does”. This could be said of Dempsey himself, with his tactile poetry warm, as in the lovely “Le mie mani”, with hands, kisses, textures, affection. There is much conversation in these poems. Voice is given to molecules, goldfish, birds and even a ball. In “Tales told by birds” hatchlings are told stories of how they are the only survivors, as if humans “had never been invented”. Sometimes inanimate objects are whimsically brought to life, like the “Fallen angel on the graveyard shift” who gathers snowballs and which the poet persuades: ”Go on throw it” and “…she lets Him have it”. In “Don’t forget to write” the poet enters a dialogue with his own poem: “Make me proud”, he whispers as it leaves his mouth. Even in print, the poet is in dialogue with the reader. Instead of footnotes we have italicised asides like the introductions one might get in a live reading event. There are classic literary undertones everywhere in this book, nudges towards Eliot, Whitman and Yeats, amongst many, and more extensive engagements with Shakespeare, Joyce and Dickens, yet the levity of the showman and shades of the stand-up comic are always evident. Dempsey is distinctive in print in his short, unpunctuated lines and brief stanzas, and in person, in his dapper style and audience connection. As a school teacher he must have been memorable. On Twitter he is prodigious, inventive and refreshing. This reviewer must declare an interest, as someone supported by Dónall the publisher and his wife Janice, also celebrated in the book. Nevertheless, the range of feeling, the vitality, and love of life are clear to all. Dempsey concludes in “The Nothingness”, reflecting on his birth in 1956, “would I do it/again, given half a chance/you can bet my life/I would”. Would a reader want to hear more from this poet? I bet they would.' Mandy Pannett, writer, poet and editor, comments:
'An intriguing title leads the reader into a kaleidoscopic and scintillating poetry collection by Dónall Dempsey. There is a great variety of wit and humour in these poems. ‘My Molecules are Revolting’ uses dialogue as a device to illustrate the repartee between the Universe and a couple of molecules that currently inhabit the narrator’s body while they wait for ‘the Big Bang/of Death’ and the chance of belonging to a more interesting formation in the future. An amusing concept but it is always Death that hovers in the background. In the title poem there is the nightmarish texture of an aunt’s fox-fur stole which has ‘beady eyes alive with death.’ Every item of clothing in the dark wardrobe is ‘rotten now/eaten by time.’ Everything once belonging to loved ones is dead. ‘I cry for the death of summer,’ says the narrator. ‘I cry for the death of them all.’... " — Mandy Pannett, writer, poet and editor. ‘Dempsey is a master of the short, unpunctuated line that draws us into his world step-by-step, and it’s a place where we want to be immersed. A library returns to the woodland the books and furniture are made of, so that we stand among trees. Beloved relatives are conjured up from what remains, perhaps no more than an inherited hat. Although minimalist, these poems reach into the deepest subjects, taking us to a future where birds remain to recall how humans caused their own extinction. Through it all, darkness and light are woven together with deft magic.’
— Adele Ward, writer, editor and academic John W Sexton, poet, novelist, short story writer and radio scriptwriter, comments:
‘One of the true outstanding figures of the Irish Outrider Troubadour tradition, Dónall Dempsey is the oracle of the universal past, in whose hands the group mind of memory catches up with the present, outpaces it and advances into the future. In his sixth poetry collection, The Fox, The Whale & The Wardrobe, Dempsey once again inhabits all of his past moments, as son, nephew, father, partner, even objective observer; and the performative energy of the poems transfers those moments onto the reader, until we inhabit them also, and find ourselves performing as the very characters of the author's absurdist autobiographical folktale, where the poet is a Trickster surrounded by Tricksters, and reality flitters in and out, revealed as the greatest Trickster of them all.’ |
