Seeing Yellow

Empathy, historical awareness and a meticulous attention to detail have long been among the trademarks of Eva Bourke's poetry. In Seeing Yellow, her seventh collection, even in a vignette of her young mother in an unremarkable small railway station, the German-born Galway resident makes her readers mindful of "the disasters and joys" of the past and of those who face them "with nothing but ... light luggage". The title poem recalls the failing Pearse Hutchinson in hospital, his visitor, inspired by Van Gogh, bringing the old poet a bunch of sun owers for his bedside, holding "their rough stalks like torches" for the journey ahead. Though her poetry cannot be reduced to a function, its power to build connections between here and there, now and then, is everywhere evident in a book of heartfelt and graceful expression where "the garden gates of memory" may at any moment swing open, to reveal not so much a distant world as an invitation to see our own in a new light.