Poetry review – CELL: Nick Cooke takes a serious look at the very serious themes addressed in a powerful new collection by Ruth O’Callaghan
Cell
Ruth O’Callaghan
Shoestring Press
ISBN 978-1-915553-67-6
94pp £12
Reviewing a previous O’Callaghan collection, Mapping the Light, for London Grip, I remarked that “Although … O’Callaghan’s righteous anger sometimes sparks a tendency to preach to the very probably converted, she deserves much credit overall for a work that shows both great humanity and considerable technical ambition.” I also felt I had to question the credibility of some of the dialect included in certain poems. My feeling about this latest book, her sixteenth in only eighteen years, is very similar, in terms of both its manifest strengths and its occasional flaws.
Taking as its starting point a quotation from US writer and ambassador Henry Van Dyke – “Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul” – Cell opens with an imagined ‘Statement Found When Demolishing an 18th Century Gaol’, which is then repeated, as a form of ongoing refrain, at the start of the next poem, ‘Yratilos’:
Without pain my body is illiterate.
To welcome adversity is to conquer it:
Each humiliation they inflict, each torture
increases determination to follow my own will.
O’Callaghan soon digs beneath the abstractions to expose the fleshly specificity of the torments undergone:
The walls will harbour my touch, the plank
to which I have nightly bequeathed my body
will retain the remains of my skin, stain of my blood,
my own very unique being.
In a collection characterised by further evidence of its author’s willingness to encompass all kinds of poetic forms, including a villanelle and a palindrome poem, O’Callaghan explores different senses of the title word. She concentrates mainly on instances of suffering, chiefly those caused by torture, which either involve physical incarceration or imply that such pain invariably creates a form of isolation, particularly of interlocutors or readers, due to lack of shared experience, are unable to empathise, though they may sympathise. The very lengthy ‘Yratilos’ (‘Solitary’ in reverse), of which more in detail anon, presents one character we assume to be a wrongly detained, supposedly an illegal refugee, on the left-hand pages, while the words on the right-hand pages are spoken by his jailer. Both characters suffer in different ways, as it could be argued the jailer is more genuinely imprisoned (within his own ignorance and prejudices) than his charge.
Subsequent poems do not shy away from descriptions of extreme pain, with ‘Anchorite’, based on Julian of Norwich’s The Revelation of Divine Love, describing “the grievous hardness / of nails driven into that sweet tenderness / of the beloved body whose blood / poured from ever wider wounds”. However, that poem tellingly, finishes with the agony undergone not by Christ but by those forced to witness his crucifixion, trapped as they are in their own helpless isolation, albeit the experience is generalised by the term “Lover”:
Now I know, of all the pains that lead
to salvation, this is the greatest –
to see the Lover suffer.
Later, lovers in the more common use of the term also come under O’Callaghan’s microscope. In ‘Marriage’, the tedium and loneliness that wedlock can entail is dealt with honestly and painfully, as “a life of endless tomorrows / rife with impossible promises” and is also portrayed “with the tonnage of every nuance hanging heavy”. Echoing the idea of broken or unrealistic promises, ‘Dear John’ points up the kind of anticlimax that presumably leads to the letters thus called being written:
what
love desires is fire not anodyne
promises over years which leave us
where?
Brief, illicit loves invariably lead to years of awkwardness and inexpressible anguish, or so ‘Affair’ intimates, with the final stanza producing both a poignant form of bathos, and a last word which blows the gaff, as it were:
On our anniversary we passed
in the quad, pretended an interest
in feral pigeons – vermin wings beating lust.
By way of a possible solution to the stress of buried trauma, ‘Protected Tenancy’ implies a need to construct a metaphorical room in which ugly memories can be shut away, with “the room fastened, / fortified forever against such terror lying within.”
Though some might feel that Hiroshima is a theme on which any writer runs the risk of encountering “compassion fatigue”, the events of 6 August 1945 form the subject of what is probably the book’s most powerful and memorable section. O’Callaghan focuses on the man who actually released the fateful weapon, U.S. General Paul Warfield Tibbets, who later reflected that “the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business”. His proud and loving mother was called Enola Gay, a name now better known than his own, while his team’s moniker for the actual bomb encapsulates the deliberate banality (very much in Hannah Arendt’s sense) of O’Callaghan’s tone, in ‘Family Values’:
So it was when Paul and his friends decided
hatching time had come, named bearer
after mom to dispatch a squat wee feller
when weather allowed: meet Little Boy.
She writes in similar vein, in ‘Timeline’, again implicitly juxtaposing the unthinking, unquestioning nature of Tibbets’ life and actions against their horrendous consequences, with each stanza ending “before you move on” – something that of course the event’s victims could not do. O’Callaghan contrasts Tibbets’ perspective with the very different ones of Hiroshima’s residents, the most touching of which I witnessed in ‘Miyoko’, about an innocent and beautiful schoolgirl, where motherhood has a very different function from Enola Gay’s uncritical pride:
Wishing munitions had fallen to girls
Miyoko tries to recognise the high flying bird
falling steadily: later, mother identifies a geta sandal:
daughter’s body missing.
Occasional blemishes I did encounter, most specifically with regard to ‘Yratilos’, in which, as in Mapping the Light, O’Callaghan attempts a form of dialect that I struggled to identify, in terms of provenance:
Word book
before die saytolearn tenwordsday. I goodboy
obey but no havespeak person.
“Before die”; “havespeak person”. As an English language teacher, I’m afraid such phrases don’t really ring true as the “interlanguage”, to use the technical term, of someone trying to achieve an elementary grasp of the language. The detained refugee seems to recall a repressive childhood: “Then books burn. I myhide. / Father find. Burn in fear. Now I much grey. / Language gone. Freedom gone No thinkback.” Without wishing to belabour the point, nobody in my experience would ever say “I myhide” instead of “I hide myself”, although the utterly bereft state conveyed by the far more credible “Language gone. Freedom gone” certainly benefits from the grammatical paring down.
Meanwhile the jailer speaks in a generic form of Northern English that at terms recalls a script of Coronation Street, perhaps of Ena-Sharples vintage:
Bloody boots. I told ’em won’t need ’em if him what built this shithole
could be trusted. Would they listen? Hell as like. Frustrated queers
whole ruddy bunch of ’em.
The jailer’s “unreconstructed” views extend to women:
Now Donna…Need to keep her on a tight lead.
Donna don’t do dirt. Or shitsoil. Said no way.
Told her. Straight. Mean. ‘S a bloody woman’s work. She just looked.
Overall, the way the man is presented hardly rises above basic caricature that threatens to vitiate the poet’s intention of portraying him as a grittily honest, and presumably sympathetic figure. I found that both voices tended to grate after a few pages and fourteen of them definitely seemed too long.
However, despite my belief that O’Callaghan might have been well advised to edit, or even jettison this poem, I did very much admire the collection overall, and I’m glad that her prolific record suggests we won’t have to wait long for further samples.
Jul 16 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Ruth O’Callaghan
Poetry review – CELL: Nick Cooke takes a serious look at the very serious themes addressed in a powerful new collection by Ruth O’Callaghan
Reviewing a previous O’Callaghan collection, Mapping the Light, for London Grip, I remarked that “Although … O’Callaghan’s righteous anger sometimes sparks a tendency to preach to the very probably converted, she deserves much credit overall for a work that shows both great humanity and considerable technical ambition.” I also felt I had to question the credibility of some of the dialect included in certain poems. My feeling about this latest book, her sixteenth in only eighteen years, is very similar, in terms of both its manifest strengths and its occasional flaws.
Taking as its starting point a quotation from US writer and ambassador Henry Van Dyke – “Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul” – Cell opens with an imagined ‘Statement Found When Demolishing an 18th Century Gaol’, which is then repeated, as a form of ongoing refrain, at the start of the next poem, ‘Yratilos’:
O’Callaghan soon digs beneath the abstractions to expose the fleshly specificity of the torments undergone:
In a collection characterised by further evidence of its author’s willingness to encompass all kinds of poetic forms, including a villanelle and a palindrome poem, O’Callaghan explores different senses of the title word. She concentrates mainly on instances of suffering, chiefly those caused by torture, which either involve physical incarceration or imply that such pain invariably creates a form of isolation, particularly of interlocutors or readers, due to lack of shared experience, are unable to empathise, though they may sympathise. The very lengthy ‘Yratilos’ (‘Solitary’ in reverse), of which more in detail anon, presents one character we assume to be a wrongly detained, supposedly an illegal refugee, on the left-hand pages, while the words on the right-hand pages are spoken by his jailer. Both characters suffer in different ways, as it could be argued the jailer is more genuinely imprisoned (within his own ignorance and prejudices) than his charge.
Subsequent poems do not shy away from descriptions of extreme pain, with ‘Anchorite’, based on Julian of Norwich’s The Revelation of Divine Love, describing “the grievous hardness / of nails driven into that sweet tenderness / of the beloved body whose blood / poured from ever wider wounds”. However, that poem tellingly, finishes with the agony undergone not by Christ but by those forced to witness his crucifixion, trapped as they are in their own helpless isolation, albeit the experience is generalised by the term “Lover”:
Later, lovers in the more common use of the term also come under O’Callaghan’s microscope. In ‘Marriage’, the tedium and loneliness that wedlock can entail is dealt with honestly and painfully, as “a life of endless tomorrows / rife with impossible promises” and is also portrayed “with the tonnage of every nuance hanging heavy”. Echoing the idea of broken or unrealistic promises, ‘Dear John’ points up the kind of anticlimax that presumably leads to the letters thus called being written:
Brief, illicit loves invariably lead to years of awkwardness and inexpressible anguish, or so ‘Affair’ intimates, with the final stanza producing both a poignant form of bathos, and a last word which blows the gaff, as it were:
By way of a possible solution to the stress of buried trauma, ‘Protected Tenancy’ implies a need to construct a metaphorical room in which ugly memories can be shut away, with “the room fastened, / fortified forever against such terror lying within.”
Though some might feel that Hiroshima is a theme on which any writer runs the risk of encountering “compassion fatigue”, the events of 6 August 1945 form the subject of what is probably the book’s most powerful and memorable section. O’Callaghan focuses on the man who actually released the fateful weapon, U.S. General Paul Warfield Tibbets, who later reflected that “the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business”. His proud and loving mother was called Enola Gay, a name now better known than his own, while his team’s moniker for the actual bomb encapsulates the deliberate banality (very much in Hannah Arendt’s sense) of O’Callaghan’s tone, in ‘Family Values’:
So it was when Paul and his friends decided hatching time had come, named bearer after mom to dispatch a squat wee feller when weather allowed: meet Little Boy.She writes in similar vein, in ‘Timeline’, again implicitly juxtaposing the unthinking, unquestioning nature of Tibbets’ life and actions against their horrendous consequences, with each stanza ending “before you move on” – something that of course the event’s victims could not do. O’Callaghan contrasts Tibbets’ perspective with the very different ones of Hiroshima’s residents, the most touching of which I witnessed in ‘Miyoko’, about an innocent and beautiful schoolgirl, where motherhood has a very different function from Enola Gay’s uncritical pride:
Occasional blemishes I did encounter, most specifically with regard to ‘Yratilos’, in which, as in Mapping the Light, O’Callaghan attempts a form of dialect that I struggled to identify, in terms of provenance:
“Before die”; “havespeak person”. As an English language teacher, I’m afraid such phrases don’t really ring true as the “interlanguage”, to use the technical term, of someone trying to achieve an elementary grasp of the language. The detained refugee seems to recall a repressive childhood: “Then books burn. I myhide. / Father find. Burn in fear. Now I much grey. / Language gone. Freedom gone No thinkback.” Without wishing to belabour the point, nobody in my experience would ever say “I myhide” instead of “I hide myself”, although the utterly bereft state conveyed by the far more credible “Language gone. Freedom gone” certainly benefits from the grammatical paring down.
Meanwhile the jailer speaks in a generic form of Northern English that at terms recalls a script of Coronation Street, perhaps of Ena-Sharples vintage:
Bloody boots. I told ’em won’t need ’em if him what built this shithole could be trusted. Would they listen? Hell as like. Frustrated queers whole ruddy bunch of ’em.The jailer’s “unreconstructed” views extend to women:
Overall, the way the man is presented hardly rises above basic caricature that threatens to vitiate the poet’s intention of portraying him as a grittily honest, and presumably sympathetic figure. I found that both voices tended to grate after a few pages and fourteen of them definitely seemed too long.
However, despite my belief that O’Callaghan might have been well advised to edit, or even jettison this poem, I did very much admire the collection overall, and I’m glad that her prolific record suggests we won’t have to wait long for further samples.