Mini-Pack: Review of Oisin Breen + Poems by Maggie Petrella & Hibah Shabkhez

FLASH REVIEW: A CLOSER LOOK AT “FLOWERS, ALL SORTS IN BLOSSOM, FIGS, BERRIES, AND FRUITS FORGOTTEN” BY OISIN BREEN

Hybrid Press, U.K. 2020. £10.00

Oisin Breen’s full length collection, Flowers, all sorts in blossom, figs, berries, and fruits forgotten, is a composition of pure, unfettered beauty. Breen helps resurrect the epic poem for a

new generation, only to play the role of dissector and cut its body into three sections. Slowly, but surely unraveling each and every stanza, every poem a wound being unstitched. The imagery and language used presents a unique collage of gathered thoughts. The order of how this work is presented harkens to that of a poetic opera, with three sets, each containing anywhere between 19 poems.

Like most great poetry collections, Breen does a fantastic job at making each section different while still connecting them to the same thread. In the first section, “Isn't the act of placing flowers on a tomb, a gesture of bringing a little life back to the dead?,� Breen sets off this collection in a viscerally obscure manner. Especially, in poem four, a unique set of quandaries are made to the universe through a depiction of nightfall unlike one read before.

I ask then of you these questions: What maker stretched out melancholy, like a fattened pig's skin, into a parchment of minor regrets?

What constellation blasted drear light, a nova of turned down gas dials, into a litany of hot wind and frozen pipes?

What songbird hovered flightlessly, its wings silent, and its mouth open, precocious in a rendition of the vacuum?

What night, illuminated by the mossy green of old lamplight, its possibilities fragmenting like forming ice, sheds skin in recompense for a fallow wantonness on the lips?

By the time one reaches the 11th poem in this section, readers should expect to have themselves floored by the sheer wilderness of human confession displayed with lines like this shown below: I am a silky orgasm pressed against an antique trunk, and the man answering the bell in a kimono to a drunken father with spittle where there should be the careworn features of love.

I am hot sweat on Maltese streets aware of the lies I am telling just for a kiss because I am so afraid I have forgotten how to feel.

And I watch with terrified eyes as mortar fire lays waste to Straight Street, and grin when I see Abu George is still selling beer, although there is a crater at his door.

And I feel the heat in me and drunkenly harangue a jet-lagged poet

slumped at my table, a mess of paper strewn at his feet.

In the second section: “Dublin and the Loose Footwork of Deity,” Breen continues the transition of anthological storytelling in the form of lyrical verse. A distinct set of lines can be seen here several pages already in this second section: Think again of the rain.

Think of how your mother's mother's heart would fall from her body for want of all this for her children.

And (remember) you said, asking me if I did -- do you remember when we played under that apple tree?

I do.

I remember its roots digging beneath me, and the taste of it filled me, and I wanted it to, so much so that today I’d gladly be down on all fours sucking and licking the juice of it from my own dead skin.

As we traverse through the landscape of this work even further, there lies the final section, “Her Cross Carried, Burnt.” A final portion of the manuscript that reads more as requiem to every sad song placed onto each page. A grand finale not only implied as a conclusion, but applied as a farewell to time. A dedication to the beauty of decay, and the finite love for what is only temporary in our plain.

The flowers they are fallen, The fruit it is rotten, But your grave is as pretty as ever.

Each year I sing this better.

Three lines. One song.

I incant.

I must and I will.

Overall, despite the use of the title, readers soon realize the use of guttural imagery is an example of the many different lives that try to make it through a world that feels like a funeral. To find breadths of beauty, like a barricade of flowers posted around gravestones, the strife of family members, the experiences of nature’s most depressing elements, there is still a majesty that follows. Yes the narrative decries struggle, but it’s a beautiful struggle, and even more beautiful acceptance on mortality of us all. A manifesto for how we handle our own existentialism.

YE SEEK THE LÆCE YCLEPT SOMMEIL

by Hibah Shabkhez Sleep, my friend. Hope and mattresses were once Made of the same slim frost-hued thing.

And shall be again. Plucked from a dead bird Or fastened on to give it wing, It has empire over the acid snows Of despair. Powers forgotten, Like feather-beds and mother-earth that grows Us its children in the open And not in brick-balconied flower-pots.

Sleep, and let dreams teach it to soar, Whisper over if onlies and cannots: ‘Koete. Koete, come watch me bore Through thy vilest abysses, ô désespoir, A passage to peace and to rain That courses cleansingly into the noir By which you would ascendance gain.’

PINK FAIRY ARMADILLO QUESTS We seek things worth doing well and badly: Like ambered-starlight-wrestling with the sea; Poems in foreign Tongues : oui ? non ? that peut-ĂŞtre Will rule the world in Verbing unsuspecting nouns in phone-texts, Uttering quips untrammelled by contexts.

Things pink fairy armadillos would be Proud to dust-coat their shells for. Treasures we Hunt without soiling Their translucent armour-laced Chests; like the coiling And swift uncoiling of the Cobra King Who learnt from feckless Man to sway and sing.

PSALM 23

by Maggie Petrella My pantsuit is my shepherd; I shall not want.

She leadeth me to sit down in tall-backed office chairs: she maketh small talk with me beside the water cooler.

She restoreth my soul: she leadeth me in the paths of badassery for her name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the conference room full of men, I will fear no evil: for my nude pumps art with me; thy click and thy clack they comfort me.

Thou preparest a meeting agenda before me in the presence of mine coworkers: thou anointest my head with bobby pins; my coffee mug runneth over.

Surely bonuses and raises shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the office of the businesswoman forever.

Oisin Breen

OisĂ­n Breen is a 34 year-old poet, part time academic in narratological complexity, and a financial journalist. Dublin born and bred, Breen spent the last decade living in Edinburgh, after a rip-roaring period that took in, amongst other things, the Middle East; a stint in a bizarre one donkey town with excellent wine; and a total inability to properly fit a door onto a mountain. His debut collection, Flowers, all sorts in blossom, figs, berries, and fruits, forgotten was released Mar. 29 by Hybrid press in Edinburgh

Maggie Petrella

Maggie Petrella (she/her) is a poet based in Buffalo, New York, but currently probably lost somewhere in the continental US. Her poetry has appeared in Detritus Online, dreams walking, and The Daily Drunk Mag. She tweets @maggie_425.

Hibah Shabkhez

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, a teacher of French as a foreign language and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Petrichor, Remembered Arts, Rigorous, Lunate, With Painted Words, The Dawntreader and a number of other literary magazines.

Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.