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She removes her pearls sets them on the counter with her golden chains to cool and collect dust (‘Painting Light’)
There is a cool and calculated ambition in this: both in the aforementioned desire and in the careful and methodical useful of language. Conn is sparing and at times brutally so in her use of language, applying a great deal of pressure on her choice of words. Her fascination for translating the visual language of painting into the verbal idiom of verse in turn leads her to ‘rewrite’ works by Hopper, Chagall and Naumov. Like Mandelshtam, her deft acuity of vision delights in the vivid contrast of colour and shade:
Tell me of the green fields mapped in your mind/ And the winding paths that always lead you back/ How your father held a scythe in his dark hands
Conn’s verse is also one of artful and surprising deception in which language conveys fruitful and unexpected shades of meaning for a collection so obsessed with the visual and the spatial, this is a collection that can quickly and without warning delve into the ambiguities and hidden depths of language itself – an aspect that lends Conn’s verse a sense of the treacherous and the destructive. This varies from a piercing and pain-filled exploration of uxorial jealousy in ‘I Hear Their Laughter from Another Room’ to a subtle questioning of the ostensible benefits of space exploration in ‘August Moons’ – a poem that displays a clever ability to work on several levels:
The lunacy of man steps out from the cycle of hours, cuts through space at speed/ to soar above a ball of blue and white and walk on silver dust to speak measured words from his helmeted mouth. It is hard to know which facet of the poem is the greater accomplishment: its own ‘lunacy’ or the linguistic richness of its title. In Gaelic August is ‘Lunasa’ – the month of the moon – when the summer reaches its full maturity and where the idea of the harvest moon inaugurates more favourable auspices. Conn is apt to cast a sceptical eye on the folly and theincubatorjournal.com