Poetry review – SEANG (HUNGER): Belinda Cooke reviews a moving account by Anne Casey describing a people’s displacement and ill treatment
Seang (Hunger)
Anne Casey
Salmon Books
ISBN: 978-1915022899
£12.98.
Anne Casey is an award-winning poet from Clare long emigrated to Australia. The destruction of her grandfather’s home during Ireland’s War of Independence, was a seminal influence: ‘My poetry is interwoven with the accents, myths, history, mores and preoccupations of half my life spent in Ireland … and has always been unabashedly political.’ (The Irish Times, Spring, 2023). Seang celebrates the ‘indomitable spirits’ (“Endnotes”) of post-famine immigrant girls incarcerated in the Newcastle Industrial School in New South Wales, Her imagined ‘voicing’ of their rebellious actions recorded in documents has them battling Victorian era bureaucracy against overwhelming odds. It includes an introduction, references, archival images, paintings and a history of Irish Famine immigrants to Australia. The story she tells is harrowing throughout.
She begins in Ireland. The opening “A History of Rain” gives a mind-bending rain metaphor on English dominance, famine and emigration. Ireland’s rain betrayed her people through drought, storm and the futile watering of the blighted crop. The ancient Duir (oak) thirsts for rain to no avail: ‘calling, calling, yet / you failed to answer.’ (“ii, First Betrayal”), and ultimately rain cursed them with the famine and forced emigration: ‘bearer of life, / harbinger of death / and all that lies between.’ (“v”) From here she tracks the government’s laissez faire view of the famine as part of God’s plan: ‘…to maintain our principle / without starving some / of the perverse creatures –’ (“i Inception, Othering”). This she contrasts with the human cost, such as the haunting, incantatory ‘Ocras’ (“Hunger”), of a father holding his dead child: ‘his little girl now freed. It is here: his last companion, / constant, unyielding at his defeat.’ The workhouse is the brutal last resort where aged two, children are separated from the mother:
Little ghost on high,
soft white cloud
pulling, pulling
against the empty embrace
of the wintering tree –
(“Between the Fever Hospital and the Poorhouse”)
Food is exported to England while Ireland starves. The government’s quick fix is to ‘export’ 4,114 Irish workhouse girls to Australia as domestic servants and labourers’ wives. For Australians, however, they are just seen as adding to existing street crime. Their solution is to remove children from ‘inadequate’ parents and place them in industrial schools supposedly for re-education, but in practice just brutal prisons.
Casey has us rooting for her girls, whom nothing can break: ‘Out into the night air, / a mob of precocious viragos –.‘ (“iii Escape!, Bedlam in the Barracks”). For many it is jut a cycle of hunger, prostitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancies, brutal marriages, incarcerations for petty crime, or more serious, accusations of murder and/or infanticide: ‘What possessed this mother mild / to go and drown her daughter’s child – / a tiny mite but newly born?’ (“Mother of Mary”). Casey, nevertheless, celebrates how these women still attempt agency. We have Jane Davis after numerous incarcerations, and marriages, still fighting her corner: ‘…packed of to ‘school’, / but swore black and blue / she wouldn’t be ruled!’(“Any Old Iron?”), while the desperation of an imprisoned girl losing her child after birth is almost too much to read:
Rockabye baby,
sleeping in peace,
far from the plight
at her young mother’s feet.
With no one to watch
or hold her a spell,
Sarah Jane’s rocking
alone in her cell.
(“Lullaby to Sarah Jane”)
Casey gives a resounding conclusion which considers where she fits within the Australian’s colonisation of the indigenous populations. She also foregrounds her book’s contemporary relevance due to: ‘newly emerging crises driven by climate, economic and political forces where women and children still face the greatest disadvantage’.
Aug 30 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Anne Casey
Poetry review – SEANG (HUNGER): Belinda Cooke reviews a moving account by Anne Casey describing a people’s displacement and ill treatment
Seang (Hunger)
Anne Casey
Salmon Books
ISBN: 978-1915022899
£12.98.
Anne Casey is an award-winning poet from Clare long emigrated to Australia. The destruction of her grandfather’s home during Ireland’s War of Independence, was a seminal influence: ‘My poetry is interwoven with the accents, myths, history, mores and preoccupations of half my life spent in Ireland … and has always been unabashedly political.’ (The Irish Times, Spring, 2023). Seang celebrates the ‘indomitable spirits’ (“Endnotes”) of post-famine immigrant girls incarcerated in the Newcastle Industrial School in New South Wales, Her imagined ‘voicing’ of their rebellious actions recorded in documents has them battling Victorian era bureaucracy against overwhelming odds. It includes an introduction, references, archival images, paintings and a history of Irish Famine immigrants to Australia. The story she tells is harrowing throughout.
She begins in Ireland. The opening “A History of Rain” gives a mind-bending rain metaphor on English dominance, famine and emigration. Ireland’s rain betrayed her people through drought, storm and the futile watering of the blighted crop. The ancient Duir (oak) thirsts for rain to no avail: ‘calling, calling, yet / you failed to answer.’ (“ii, First Betrayal”), and ultimately rain cursed them with the famine and forced emigration: ‘bearer of life, / harbinger of death / and all that lies between.’ (“v”) From here she tracks the government’s laissez faire view of the famine as part of God’s plan: ‘…to maintain our principle / without starving some / of the perverse creatures –’ (“i Inception, Othering”). This she contrasts with the human cost, such as the haunting, incantatory ‘Ocras’ (“Hunger”), of a father holding his dead child: ‘his little girl now freed. It is here: his last companion, / constant, unyielding at his defeat.’ The workhouse is the brutal last resort where aged two, children are separated from the mother:
Little ghost on high,
soft white cloud
pulling, pulling
against the empty embrace
of the wintering tree –
(“Between the Fever Hospital and the Poorhouse”)
Food is exported to England while Ireland starves. The government’s quick fix is to ‘export’ 4,114 Irish workhouse girls to Australia as domestic servants and labourers’ wives. For Australians, however, they are just seen as adding to existing street crime. Their solution is to remove children from ‘inadequate’ parents and place them in industrial schools supposedly for re-education, but in practice just brutal prisons.
Casey has us rooting for her girls, whom nothing can break: ‘Out into the night air, / a mob of precocious viragos –.‘ (“iii Escape!, Bedlam in the Barracks”). For many it is jut a cycle of hunger, prostitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancies, brutal marriages, incarcerations for petty crime, or more serious, accusations of murder and/or infanticide: ‘What possessed this mother mild / to go and drown her daughter’s child – / a tiny mite but newly born?’ (“Mother of Mary”). Casey, nevertheless, celebrates how these women still attempt agency. We have Jane Davis after numerous incarcerations, and marriages, still fighting her corner: ‘…packed of to ‘school’, / but swore black and blue / she wouldn’t be ruled!’(“Any Old Iron?”), while the desperation of an imprisoned girl losing her child after birth is almost too much to read:
Rockabye baby,
sleeping in peace,
far from the plight
at her young mother’s feet.
With no one to watch
or hold her a spell,
Sarah Jane’s rocking
alone in her cell.
(“Lullaby to Sarah Jane”)
Casey gives a resounding conclusion which considers where she fits within the Australian’s colonisation of the indigenous populations. She also foregrounds her book’s contemporary relevance due to: ‘newly emerging crises driven by climate, economic and political forces where women and children still face the greatest disadvantage’.