Breakfast at Kilumney – Maureen Weldon
From THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND
P. O. Box 1213, London N6 5HZ
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Book Review:
Breakfast at Kilumney by Maureen Weldon.
Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY, England (poetrymonthly@btinternet.com) ISBN 978-1-906357-31-3, Paperback, 47pp., 5 pounds.
Just occasionally, the Small Press turns up a gem, a gift to us all. Martin Holroyd’s Poetry Monthly Press has now done that.
“Because Time is Such a Short Wink”, the last piece in Maureen Weldon’s new collection, is about as close to perfection as an early version of a poem is likely to get. This is no exaggeration.
Every image in the poem is original and powerful. Every word sits where it must, as though it had been invented to grace this very poem.
I have watched Weldon’s progression from an exuberant, gifted novice to a disciplined writer at times quite ruthless in trimming lines down to the essential. But she is still, although very rarely, tripped up by the odd cliché, like “she is a delight”. But even then she closes the weakened poem with “to pass the day into stars”, that soars.
(A cliché is an attractive expression so worn by over-use that it loses its meaning. It is useful because it identifies hidden meaning lurking beyond the words, waiting to be expressed in a new way. When I spot a cliché in my own copy — we all do — I ask myself to say the same in different words. This can be difficult. In my experience, it is always rewarding.)
Weldon — child Maureen, life-loving Maureen, powerful Maureen — shines through the text: “To be alive is sufficient”, “I want to juggle the stars”, “The root is very strong” and “Hope:/like a new moon, or a new lover’s kiss”.
Over the years, Weldon has been introducing something new to European literature: publicly expressed approval of the joyful freedom of old women and old people to seek fulfilment within themselves and each other.
“Stars are the footlights”, observes a retired ballerina in the new collection as she sits in shawls and buttoned-up boots, and “sun floods my stage”.
And, in a poem about the always untimely decay of human beauty — hers, yours and mine — she resolves to light romantic candles, “One for him, one for me” and with “breasts high as Olympian peaks” and “Lips cunning like Aphrodite” to celebrate life until dawn.
May these lines take root in the culture.
Thomas Land
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