Portrait of a Woman Walking Home by Anne Casey
Portrait of a Woman Walking Home (2021, Recent Work Press) is the latest collection from Irish poet Anne Casey. An accomplished poet based in Sydney, Casey has three other collections to her name and an impressive list of international literary accolades and awards.
Many of the poems in this latest collection handle ideas and ideals of womanhood. Casey invites the reader to step into her shoes and join her on a walk through what being a woman might mean within historical and contemporary society. The themes she covers will be unsurprising to many, and the collection sits firmly in the space left in the wake of #MeToo and similar movements; one where the trauma, secrets, dread and rage of being a woman are forcefully spoken about and shared.
The opening poem, Welcome to your Life Cruises self-guided tour [Official transcript], is a brilliantly creative and powerful introduction to the path ahead. Casey has written a brief tour guide introduction to the State of Womanhood, with redacted passages and asterisked points;
Please prepare to disembark for your overnight adventure
at the Precipice of Girlhood. If you have not read our preparatory notes
on local customs, here is a quick recap: You do not have an opinion. If you think
you have an opinion, it will be summarily refuted.
The tongue in cheek monologue is only made more humorous for the truths it contains. An asterisked sentiment is clarified at the end of the poem:
*Travel Advisory - State of Womanhood: Violent and/or fatal assaults have been recorded in the case of one third of tour participants.
Darkling, a poem written for the survivors of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes is one of the shortest in the collection but holds a lot of power. Casey explains in the notes how the bodies of 800 babies were found in a septic tank under one of these homes in 2017. Darkling is a cry for lost protection.
Ghosting over shadows
of fates evanesced,
you waxed and waned
while no-one knew
how you’d
let them down.
Where some of the poems handle more universal themes, the collection is focused on Casey’s individual experiences of womanhood, amongst her broader life experiences. Over a Midnight Shore and Let me count the ways are both odes to Casey’s mother, and the grief of losing and missing someone close. Red hot sting hones in on the traumatic birth of Casey’s son:
and I was the lady sawn in half at the circus,
but without the magic-
clasping the creeping rose at my middle,
a pale faced aide leaving me holding my two halves together,
trying not to let escape the dark crimson slithering thing I feared might be my liver.
There is a poignant nod to the ways women are always held accountable for their experiences of trauma, even those they have very little control over (like giving birth) and the sting of these words, especially when they’re from the mouths of other women:
A nurse from Waterford, turned Reiki healer, later told me
I hadn’t let go-
that’s why I failed,
in the way it happens-
the switchblade wounds of women’s tongues
stinging more than any surgeon’s knife
Casey’s prose is often lyrical, with a subtle lucid quality. Some poems, like Still I Rise (a nod to the incomparable Maya Angelou) are full-force, rhymed prose, hitting you squarely in the chest:
Did my sexiness arouse you
when I was barely aged thirteen -
when you trailed me with your wanting
gobbing offers so obscene?
Others, like Consummation of dreams, are more abstract, but equally intense and compelling:
the whipping wind
to swarm, spit, lick
inside the splintered rim-
a crab’s split grin
In her acknowledgements, Casey is clear that answering the question of what these poems are about ‘is complicated’ because the experience of womanhood is complicated, “in the way being any second class citizen. Is complicated.”
The acknowledgement Casey leaves us with is a poetic force in and of itself. While many of the poems deal with womanhood, she covers other ground and as a reader, we’re often pulled away from this consistent narrative, into other worlds and ideas, before being pulled back, nudged or coaxed to where we started, further along on our tour of the State of Womanhood.
It’s a perfect nod to the ways real-life does this to us, and that amongst the trauma, loss and grief there is also, always, love and hope:
“It’s about love, lust, loss, and the delicate art of keeping it together. Even in your broken moments. So yeah. It’s complicated. And sometimes. Sometimes. It. Is. Unimaginably. Beautiful.”
This short collection won’t take up too much of your time, but it’s one that will stay with you, a constant invitation to keep exploring and taking the tour.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
