At the heart of her fourth collection, Louise C. Callaghan focuses on the last days of her dying mother,
Mother dying, is looking for signs.
And now she has gone beyond
personality, no longer concerned
with who we are…
In these five poems of ‘Our Daily Practice’, the voice is lyrical, restrained and searching.
The volume also contains a series of fourteen poems about Fransisco de Goya. Both in the prelude, ‘Portrait of Mañuel Osorio de Zuñiga’,
You know the one, the dark-haired child
with a bird tied to a length of thread…
and the series, ‘Ears for the Deaf Man’, details of his life as court painter are fused with his daily life in the terrible years of early nineteenth century Spain. There is in these poems a simplicity of images and plain statement of stark emotion:
So recently dead
they still gleam
with life.
‘Still Life With Golden Bream’