"A break in the journey" by Anne Haverty (New Island Books, 2018)

Poems from Stinging Fly, SHOp, The Moth, etc. I'm not convinced by her use of short lines. This is from "India"

To accept your state their betters say is a tenet of their faith. They're accepting, grateful even for the life they got.

The use of punctuation here is rather erratic too. In most of her poems, lines start with an upper case letter, as in the following example in p.23 where there's more over-use of line-breaks.

But then the daily Anguish Grips you again

I found the content rather slight and the mode of delivery unattractive until I reached "In the etheric spaces of the web a microchip" (p.24) when I suddenly felt out of my depth. It begins with "Translates from the Portuguese the story of a Novel" which might be the continuation of the title. The poem might be just that - a translation - and the novel might have been her own. It has phrases like "The rustic voices and environs/ Populate the narration of one" which sound machine-translated. Soon after that poem there's "Liberty Square", which isn't so easy either. The narrator, seeing on TV scenes from Syria - Liberty Square, Kobane after a battle - merges it with memories of Liberty Square in Thurles, County Tipperary, and people she knew. Interesting, but then with poems like "Objecting to everything today" we hit the ground with a thud. We're back to the old simple and strong with a "masterful lightness of touch" versus bland debate.

But I like "The Beds of Europe" and "I mourn the funerals". The last 20 pages (trans-Europe poems) comprise my favourite section, though "Memorial" is a bit weak.

Other reviews

• Irish Independent
• Jean O'Brien (tumbling with deftness, humour, irony and precision through history and Eastern Europe, with poems about vodka, life, love –and back to earth with a bump in Tipperary. ... Haverty gets the big things in little things – small ideas become big, as her poems recognise how we blow up small happenings; she is good at putting words on the travails of life and reminds us in her wry way that we are lucky)