Poetry review – THE ELIMINATION GAME: Diana Cant admires Mary Mulholland’s frank and eloquent ways of dealing with issues of ageing
the elimination game
Mary Mulholland
Broken Sleep Books
ISBN 978-1-917617-21-5
£10.99
It’s perhaps no accident that the title of Mary Mulholland’s most recent pamphlet carries echoes of that TV game show, The Generation Game. There is certainly a battling for position between the generations, but the authors’ focus here is on the oldest generation, especially women, and the battle is against relegation and oblivion.
And the poems fight a good fight: they are by turns witty and tender, angry and assertive; they are the testament of someone intently exploring what it means to get old, physically, emotionally, and in the context of both family and society. Old women get a bad press these days, and Mulholland offers many examples of the names they get called – ‘a shuffle of wandering fog people’, ‘urn-waiting crones’, ‘batty old trout’. Her poems are a refutation of these labels.
The title poem demonstrates this precisely; it’s a columnar poem, the first half of which lists a series of derogatory names for old women, with a dramatic turn in the middle, ‘FU for the shoehorning’, and ending with a ‘ta-da’ moment:
last year I swam in the
arctic trekked the sahara then
mastered roller-blading next up
i’m starting classes in mandarin
But the complexities and contradictions of ageing are also addressed. In “Hell Hole (Kollhellaren)”, the poet describes entering a sea cave in Norway where there are prehistoric paintings :
though inside she still feels thirty.
she knows she must enter the hell hole
in a no-seeing, feeling-way forward […]
as if all searching leads to a room
filled with impenetrable riddles.
This is followed by a poem in a different register about the holding of a newborn grandchild:
afraid
to hold you, a quarter my genes,
your eyes shut fast like a puppy
exhausted after a long journey.
[“Role Change”]
The tenderness in evidence here is made more complex in the poem “Pieta”, which ends ‘there are so many kinds of death. I cradled my baby, / and people thought I was crying for joy’. Life and death, hand in hand.
The poet wears her learning lightly, so that these are poems that repay rereading, but don’t demand it. For example, “Woodstock” has the epigram ‘after Jitish Kallat’, an artist whose recently exhibited work at the Venice Biennale included the quoted phrase ‘Become who you are’. We don’t need to know this, but it adds a layer. Similarly, in the same poem, ‘Yasgur’s farm’ is where Woodstock took place, and the sentence ‘I contain multitudes’ is from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”, which, in its title, also carries a reference to the kohl-eyed, grass-smoking girl in the poem. “Grandmother’s footsteps” is a palinode (an ode refuting another ode) to a Patricia Lockwood poem, which is in itself a response to a Keats ode – three layers of complexity, and although there are all sorts of subtle references to both other poems, they are done with so light a touch that we barely notice at first, and are carried along with the humour of:
James from the Arts Council talking
to a roomful of ladies the age of his mother,
he recommends we kickstart projects, step-
change careers, champion diversity,
A great deal of thought has clearly gone into the ordering of this pamphlet. The more we read, the more we become aware of links between adjacent poems – certain objects recur, only to shape-shift into something other. Some poems have a slightly surreal cast to them – a seemingly random collection of images with a personal resonance to them that we watch gradually coalesce into a whole. Clouds become an apt metaphor for this process – ever-changing, never still.
This is a pamphlet that deftly marries humour with defiance in the face of female ageing. But it’s more than that – it carries with it a serious searching for a personal truth, a path through the forest of being woman, mother, grandmother and elder in today’s changing world. The shifting poetic forms, the varying voice, playful, poignant, reflective and questioning, all add to the richness of this timely pamphlet. Of course, there are no easy answers: the last poem, “Stilling Time”, ends with the words:
i’ll tell them i come in peace, leave my shadow
falling over the canyon edge, sinking into earth.
Jul 10 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Mary Mulholland
Poetry review – THE ELIMINATION GAME: Diana Cant admires Mary Mulholland’s frank and eloquent ways of dealing with issues of ageing
It’s perhaps no accident that the title of Mary Mulholland’s most recent pamphlet carries echoes of that TV game show, The Generation Game. There is certainly a battling for position between the generations, but the authors’ focus here is on the oldest generation, especially women, and the battle is against relegation and oblivion.
And the poems fight a good fight: they are by turns witty and tender, angry and assertive; they are the testament of someone intently exploring what it means to get old, physically, emotionally, and in the context of both family and society. Old women get a bad press these days, and Mulholland offers many examples of the names they get called – ‘a shuffle of wandering fog people’, ‘urn-waiting crones’, ‘batty old trout’. Her poems are a refutation of these labels.
The title poem demonstrates this precisely; it’s a columnar poem, the first half of which lists a series of derogatory names for old women, with a dramatic turn in the middle, ‘FU for the shoehorning’, and ending with a ‘ta-da’ moment:
But the complexities and contradictions of ageing are also addressed. In “Hell Hole (Kollhellaren)”, the poet describes entering a sea cave in Norway where there are prehistoric paintings :
though inside she still feels thirty. she knows she must enter the hell hole in a no-seeing, feeling-way forward […] as if all searching leads to a room filled with impenetrable riddles.This is followed by a poem in a different register about the holding of a newborn grandchild:
afraid to hold you, a quarter my genes, your eyes shut fast like a puppy exhausted after a long journey. [“Role Change”]The tenderness in evidence here is made more complex in the poem “Pieta”, which ends ‘there are so many kinds of death. I cradled my baby, / and people thought I was crying for joy’. Life and death, hand in hand.
The poet wears her learning lightly, so that these are poems that repay rereading, but don’t demand it. For example, “Woodstock” has the epigram ‘after Jitish Kallat’, an artist whose recently exhibited work at the Venice Biennale included the quoted phrase ‘Become who you are’. We don’t need to know this, but it adds a layer. Similarly, in the same poem, ‘Yasgur’s farm’ is where Woodstock took place, and the sentence ‘I contain multitudes’ is from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”, which, in its title, also carries a reference to the kohl-eyed, grass-smoking girl in the poem. “Grandmother’s footsteps” is a palinode (an ode refuting another ode) to a Patricia Lockwood poem, which is in itself a response to a Keats ode – three layers of complexity, and although there are all sorts of subtle references to both other poems, they are done with so light a touch that we barely notice at first, and are carried along with the humour of:
James from the Arts Council talking to a roomful of ladies the age of his mother, he recommends we kickstart projects, step- change careers, champion diversity,A great deal of thought has clearly gone into the ordering of this pamphlet. The more we read, the more we become aware of links between adjacent poems – certain objects recur, only to shape-shift into something other. Some poems have a slightly surreal cast to them – a seemingly random collection of images with a personal resonance to them that we watch gradually coalesce into a whole. Clouds become an apt metaphor for this process – ever-changing, never still.
This is a pamphlet that deftly marries humour with defiance in the face of female ageing. But it’s more than that – it carries with it a serious searching for a personal truth, a path through the forest of being woman, mother, grandmother and elder in today’s changing world. The shifting poetic forms, the varying voice, playful, poignant, reflective and questioning, all add to the richness of this timely pamphlet. Of course, there are no easy answers: the last poem, “Stilling Time”, ends with the words: