Revenant is Clare McCotter?s
second book of poems. Written within arm?s reach of a cemetery wall, the
collection inhabits a hinterland where bones, real and metaphorical,
slip their graves. In these physical and metaphysical landscapes there
is no quest for closure. Wounds and graves stay open ? resolution is out
of the question. Navigating sound waves and cartographies of wind the
dead come and they go, their bone constellations glimmering in the
townlands of County Derry, the bogs of County Meath, the sands of
Shelling Hill Beach and the Atacama Desert. Although clearly preoccupied
with the un-historied lives of women buried in that local cemetery, the
collection is not rooted in a specific place. It meanders through a
range of dark geographies, connecting sad, settled, unruly, elusive, and
desperately fragmented bones. In these liminal spaces revenants mingle
without hierarchy or division: the wakeful bones of Elizabeth Siddal
and Pablo Neruda are exhumed with those of a woman buried without
obsequies in County Derry during the 1960s. The young bones of Gaza City
move within earshot of those from Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. Housed in a
silver reliquary, the bones in Mary Magdalene?s foot long for the dark
mineral ground while an old groom dreams that Shergar?s remains will be
brought home so that he can make them lovely for the earth. The bones
of people from Antrim, Armagh and Tyrone who were disappeared during The
Troubles speak with those who vanished under the Pinochet dictatorship,
and were found years later out there where they have measured the age
of the oldest star and spread a thousand red carnations across the
desert?s frozen floor.