Poetry review – MY DEEP AND GORGEOUS THIRST: Sue Wallace-Shaddad admires Ellen McAteer’s use of imagery and metaphor in the construction of this powerful collection
My Deep and Gorgeous Thirst
Ellen McAteer
Verve Poetry Press
ISBN 9781913917579
57 pp £11.99
This collection certainly packs a punch; it is honest and visceral. The poems, in both free form and variations of prose form, capture a life from childhood to adulthood with all the demons and challenges involved, including parental and sibling relationships, drinking, the menopause and loss. There are four sections to the collection: “Accidentals”, “Drouth”, “Psychogeography” and “Yonic” but a number of themes and images run through the book binding the collection tightly together.
The life of a tomboy self is explored in “Missing Child” in the first section “Accidentals” and some words are used which will be echoed in several later poems e.g. ‘blue’ and ‘mirror’. A sense of violence emerges at the end of the final section where an alternate reality to seeking help (on being approached by a stranger) is suggested: ‘a flat hard body folded into a bin-bag’. The poet comes back to the tomboy in the final poignant poem of the collection “Pause”, where the poem opens with ‘The mirror’s cold unblinking gaze’ showing an ageing woman who was once a tomboy.
Sometimes, when chores are done, she cuts
him out with scissors, lets him play a while.
The cover has a black and white photograph of a cocktail glass with an olive on a stick (photograph by Amy Rafferty) with an urban night scene as backdrop. This and the title reflect the insidious nature of alcohol that has plagued the narrator’s family over several generations and across family life in different places — Ireland, Scotland and London. The heart of this collection is the powerful second section “Drouth” which means ‘thirst’ as explained in the poem of the same name, thirst ‘for knowledge’ but also physical thirst ‘for the bevvy’.
Without the bottle I am without skin,
eczema-red and irritable; sunburned,
The poem “My Deep and Gorgeous Thirst”, written in seven-line stanzas, takes us through the impact of alcohol on generations: grandfather, two grandmothers, mother and father and finally the self:
Tumbling down all those dry throats
into me, spirit sharpens the gimlet
in my burned mouth. […]
A later poem “On Cnoc Fola” (Bloody Foreland) uses the language of ‘granite’, ‘quartzite’, ‘limescale’ and ‘chalk’ to describe the changing nature of one grandfather’s voice as he moves from Ulster to Glasgow and the subsequent impact of this on his son’s accent and then his granddaughter’s ‘Southeastern […] tongue’. “Hefted” is also a generational poem, recalling the different houses in different places. Two sons, ‘twin lambs’, now accompany their mother on walks in each place.
I enjoyed the imagery in some of the more nature-based poems. “Mourning in Arduaine” is a good example of this with its gentle description of ‘that soft grey sympathy / of rain and stone’.
“The North Wind’s Reply” is a kind of elegy to the ‘hard bare land’ that the narrator is visiting although they acknowledge ‘we can never be joined’. There is a strong sense of place.
I will make the snow dance,
tear earth/skin from stone/bone,
caress you like a breath,
A vessel in bad weather is used as an effective metaphor for sibling relationships in the poem “Stormbringer” with ‘brother mast’ and ‘sister sail’.
Colour plays an important role in the poems. A richly visual example is “The Best Bar in the World” where a window is ‘a tall white drink of light’ and ‘The postman wears a halo’. However, the ‘glory’ of green leaves, the sparkle of salt and blue flowers underfoot is then contrasted with the self, described as ‘a brown leaf’ and ‘a veined dry thing’. The colour blue appears throughout the collection – I counted eleven mentions of the word including ‘unblue my lips’ in “Vampire” and ‘the blues’ in ‘Doctor Jazz’. Violence is near the surface in “Impact” where the sky is ‘blue as a medical glove’ and the reader is told ‘Glove yourself in drink like two blue hands’ in an attempt to avoid difficult memories. The poignant poem “My Mother as Snake” describes the condition of their mother with cancer:
Bare feet shucked
cold, blue, devoid
of blood. […]
The idea of a mirror re-emerges strongly in “Vampire” where the narrator calls for their sister to be a mirror. The poem begins ‘Without the mirror of my mother’s face / who will I be?’
Bird imagery also plays its part. “My Name is Carnival”, a prose poem with visual caesurae, has an epigraph from Jackson C. Frank: ‘I read your words like black hungry birds read every sowing’. The poem suggests reading as a haven and form of escape. The narrator compares themself, when reading to ‘hungry baby siblings’, to ‘mama birds’ which
regorge crop milk to flamingo hatchlings
“Women’s Group, Pier Road, Drug and Alcohol Project”, compares women attendees to ‘hooded crows’, ‘our beaks open’. Their children are ‘hatchlings, out of reach’. The nine-line poem “Urban Raven”’, based in a pub, is packed tight with emotion and tension. “Digging the Seaside Goth”, the previous poem, has ‘crowblack clouds’. In this latter poem, there are some other wonderful images, for example waves are ‘tinfoil wrinkles’ and the scene includes ‘unsilver striping of the black weed’ and ‘a black bin lid of // rainclouds’. In “The Engineer”, towards the end of the collection, there is a gentler reference to birds where the robin is described as the engineer’s ‘friend’. The narrator then goes on to describes themself as ‘migratory. / Always leaving, always returning’. The final few lines of the poem reveal a depth of hidden sadness:
His father’s death untethered him, but he showed
more pain to me for the baby blackbird, lying
starved on a path, wings spread in crucifixion.
There is much to admire in this collection; it feels like one that needed to be written. It holds up a mirror to the problems of alcohol abuse and the difficulties faced by generations in one family. McAteer, through their skill at writing and strength of imagery, allows words to carry the weight of emotion without seeking any sense of pity.
Apr 15 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Ellen McAteer
Poetry review – MY DEEP AND GORGEOUS THIRST: Sue Wallace-Shaddad admires Ellen McAteer’s use of imagery and metaphor in the construction of this powerful collection
This collection certainly packs a punch; it is honest and visceral. The poems, in both free form and variations of prose form, capture a life from childhood to adulthood with all the demons and challenges involved, including parental and sibling relationships, drinking, the menopause and loss. There are four sections to the collection: “Accidentals”, “Drouth”, “Psychogeography” and “Yonic” but a number of themes and images run through the book binding the collection tightly together.
The life of a tomboy self is explored in “Missing Child” in the first section “Accidentals” and some words are used which will be echoed in several later poems e.g. ‘blue’ and ‘mirror’. A sense of violence emerges at the end of the final section where an alternate reality to seeking help (on being approached by a stranger) is suggested: ‘a flat hard body folded into a bin-bag’. The poet comes back to the tomboy in the final poignant poem of the collection “Pause”, where the poem opens with ‘The mirror’s cold unblinking gaze’ showing an ageing woman who was once a tomboy.
The cover has a black and white photograph of a cocktail glass with an olive on a stick (photograph by Amy Rafferty) with an urban night scene as backdrop. This and the title reflect the insidious nature of alcohol that has plagued the narrator’s family over several generations and across family life in different places — Ireland, Scotland and London. The heart of this collection is the powerful second section “Drouth” which means ‘thirst’ as explained in the poem of the same name, thirst ‘for knowledge’ but also physical thirst ‘for the bevvy’.
The poem “My Deep and Gorgeous Thirst”, written in seven-line stanzas, takes us through the impact of alcohol on generations: grandfather, two grandmothers, mother and father and finally the self:
A later poem “On Cnoc Fola” (Bloody Foreland) uses the language of ‘granite’, ‘quartzite’, ‘limescale’ and ‘chalk’ to describe the changing nature of one grandfather’s voice as he moves from Ulster to Glasgow and the subsequent impact of this on his son’s accent and then his granddaughter’s ‘Southeastern […] tongue’. “Hefted” is also a generational poem, recalling the different houses in different places. Two sons, ‘twin lambs’, now accompany their mother on walks in each place.
I enjoyed the imagery in some of the more nature-based poems. “Mourning in Arduaine” is a good example of this with its gentle description of ‘that soft grey sympathy / of rain and stone’.
“The North Wind’s Reply” is a kind of elegy to the ‘hard bare land’ that the narrator is visiting although they acknowledge ‘we can never be joined’. There is a strong sense of place.
A vessel in bad weather is used as an effective metaphor for sibling relationships in the poem “Stormbringer” with ‘brother mast’ and ‘sister sail’.
Colour plays an important role in the poems. A richly visual example is “The Best Bar in the World” where a window is ‘a tall white drink of light’ and ‘The postman wears a halo’. However, the ‘glory’ of green leaves, the sparkle of salt and blue flowers underfoot is then contrasted with the self, described as ‘a brown leaf’ and ‘a veined dry thing’. The colour blue appears throughout the collection – I counted eleven mentions of the word including ‘unblue my lips’ in “Vampire” and ‘the blues’ in ‘Doctor Jazz’. Violence is near the surface in “Impact” where the sky is ‘blue as a medical glove’ and the reader is told ‘Glove yourself in drink like two blue hands’ in an attempt to avoid difficult memories. The poignant poem “My Mother as Snake” describes the condition of their mother with cancer:
The idea of a mirror re-emerges strongly in “Vampire” where the narrator calls for their sister to be a mirror. The poem begins ‘Without the mirror of my mother’s face / who will I be?’
Bird imagery also plays its part. “My Name is Carnival”, a prose poem with visual caesurae, has an epigraph from Jackson C. Frank: ‘I read your words like black hungry birds read every sowing’. The poem suggests reading as a haven and form of escape. The narrator compares themself, when reading to ‘hungry baby siblings’, to ‘mama birds’ which
“Women’s Group, Pier Road, Drug and Alcohol Project”, compares women attendees to ‘hooded crows’, ‘our beaks open’. Their children are ‘hatchlings, out of reach’. The nine-line poem “Urban Raven”’, based in a pub, is packed tight with emotion and tension. “Digging the Seaside Goth”, the previous poem, has ‘crowblack clouds’. In this latter poem, there are some other wonderful images, for example waves are ‘tinfoil wrinkles’ and the scene includes ‘unsilver striping of the black weed’ and ‘a black bin lid of // rainclouds’. In “The Engineer”, towards the end of the collection, there is a gentler reference to birds where the robin is described as the engineer’s ‘friend’. The narrator then goes on to describes themself as ‘migratory. / Always leaving, always returning’. The final few lines of the poem reveal a depth of hidden sadness:
There is much to admire in this collection; it feels like one that needed to be written. It holds up a mirror to the problems of alcohol abuse and the difficulties faced by generations in one family. McAteer, through their skill at writing and strength of imagery, allows words to carry the weight of emotion without seeking any sense of pity.