Victoria Kennefick & Paula Meehan

The lives depicted by Victoria Kennefick alter, shatter and recombine in stunning monologues, innovative hybrid forms and piercing lyrics: her second book Egg/Shell is a diptych, a double album, which explores early motherhood and miscarriage, and the impact of a spouse’s gender transition and the dissolution of a marriage. Acclaimed as one of the boldest poetic voices to emerge in recent years, Victoria, in the follow-up to her best-selling Eat or We Both Starve, breaks new ground with generosity, emotional complexity, formal ingenuity and wit.

Divided in two sections, ‘egg’ and ‘shell,’ the poems in the collection interrogate the roles of mother and wife and what happens when each of these are troubled for a speaker who is losing a grip on the structure of her life and sense of normality. The poems in ‘egg’ explore the dashed hope in secondary infertility as the speaker attempts to mother her existing child while the poems in ‘shell’ concern how this struggle is somewhat eclipsed by a destabilising event – the revelation that her spouse is a trans woman. The speaker experiences identity crisis and a search for a new normal as the poems explore art, nature, mythology, cooking, parenting, and even neuroplasticity in innovative, varied, and confrontational forms. Here change, welcome or not, is cathartic, revelatory and ultimately only the beginning of another journey.

Paula Meehan‘s familiar impulse towards blessing and empathy is shadowed in these poems with a clear-sighted understanding that the human perspective is neither privileged nor superior, an awareness that much if not most of existence is indifferent to our all- too-human dramas. Nevertheless, explorations of family, of her own mortality, of the lives of long-dead tenement dwellers, shift and shine in a web of stories that speak to a stubborn human endurance that is sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic – and occasionally transcendent. As well as new poems, The Solace of Artemis integrates Museum (2019), a sequence commissioned for the Dublin Tenement Museum, and For the Hungry Ghosts (2022), a poem cycle responding to the Hades episode of Joyce’s Ulysses.