The Wild Goose by Kevin Gallagher
Book Description
The Wild Goose was a hand-made magazine of verse written and edited by John Boyle O’Reilly aboard the Hougoumont, the last ship to transport British convicts to Australia. O’Reilly (1844-1890) was an Irish Fenian sentenced to life imprisonment for infiltrating the British army and attempted mutiny. O’Reilly escaped from Australia aboard a whaling ship and settled in Boston where he rose to become an editor of The Pilot, a noted poet, and abolitionist.
In a sense, these poems are a little magazine conceived of and drafted in 2018 and 2019 when Gallagher was a poet-in-residence at the Heinrich Boll Cottage, on Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland. In addition to a sequence on O’Reilly, the poems in this book engage the Irish landscape, and the history and myth that formed the identity of some of the Gallagher’s ancestors until British colonialism and associated famine took them to Massachusetts.
Commentary
Kevin Gallagher’s new book begins with Irish myth and ends with his own myth, as he visits his father in a classically tinged underworld. Using a variety of poetic forms, Gallagher creates a blend of Irish-American family experience and Irish history that features both his father and a colorful nineteenth-century Irishman who ended up in America. This poetic blend of the poet’s imaginings, memories, and careful research is absorbing, entertaining, and enlightening. —Martha Collins, author of Because What Else Could I Do?
Kevin Gallagher shows us how his sense of an Irish identity is more than a hand-me-down, that it depends on an unflinching examination of the ways voices from the past—not all of them benevolent—shape who we are and how we see the world. Gallagher imagines an array of such voices, from figures in pre-Christian myths to historical figures who resisted British colonialism. The arc of the collection aims, however, toward the present, to the Irish-American experience as well as what the poet sees and hears in Ireland today. The culmination of The Wild Goose comes in a dream-vision in which the poet is granted access to the afterlife and meets his deceased father. Says that father to his grieving son: “Let me hear you talk. I’ll talk to you too.” Crystalline imagery and carefully crafted lyrics embody Gallagher’s difficult and demanding dialogue with the long and often painful story of the culture he comes from. —Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said.
To over-underscore how Kevin Gallagher delves into Celtic mythology from the get-go with the wonderful love-poem “Birth of a Nation” and plumbs the raw contemporary ring of those legendary, gender-bendering heroes and heroines—Eithlinn and Cian, Deirdre and Diarmuid, Lir, Cairbre, Bres, all that—might be to miss the larger project, all-in, this collection’s vast and variegated canvas stretched beyond history and in your face. In The Wild Goose you will find and lose, often in the same breath, your compass points, become a bit, as the French say, déboussolé. All in a good way. Unmoored, not plot-lost. Gallagher’s poems read exquisitely and easily. With a preference for nifty, drop-stitch, loose-iambic couplets, villanelles that hypnose, The Wild Goose runs riot in lyric narrative gear, its best poems top-shelf distillations of story and meditation. And you won’t find many affirmations of a redemptive immigration policy that welcomes refugees finer than the sonnet sequence “The Journal of John Boyle O’Reilly.” —Aidan Rooney, author of Go There