Histories Haunt Us

In Triny Finlay’s second collection of poetry, she asks what it means to let in the ghosts of the past. Will memories loosen the frame of a life? Will subtle fears take over? Finlay plumbs the depths of family life as she negotiates the territories of ancestry, love, and new motherhood: a great-grandmother who went to bed for seventeen years; a lover caught with somebody else; a son’s critical illness – things that encroach, they devastate, so that you must decide: you are an anchor or you are not.

Whether she is contemplating the politics of drought in Eritrea or a safari in South Africa, Finlay does not let us forget the potency of our personal and collective histories. She also explores the expansive landscape of her experience, layering a vision of her world with that of her young son, and exposing the ache of obssession, of doubt, of suffering. This is a fragile world, in which rivers overflow and fear can become paralysing. But there is hope here, too, for the lusty aria of the newborn child, for a look we might have missed, in a different room, for the falling leaves that return to the ground, that recover us.