The female quest A Contrary review by Grace Wells 
Rootling, New & Selected Poems Katie Donovan Bloodaxe Books 2010 Buy this book...> Katie Donovan is an adventurer. This collection of new work and poems selected from her first three collections charts a personal journey that simultaneously voyages across the wide world and moves through the tight tangles of relationships, as the poet finds touchstones of truth and faith to live by on “the burdened and tainted earth.” In particular Donovan’s work articulates the female quest and does much to redress the balance of a culture largely dominated by the male odyssey. In her poem “The Bed,” Donovan writes, “Today I strip the bed—/like pulling off a skin”; she has slept in it for six years, “testing other loves/or warming my own span”—and it is this notion of a woman’s “span” that this thick book of impressive poems tirelessly, even ruthlessly, explores. In richly female, sensuous and outspoken poems Donovan pushes at the boundaries and limitations imposed on women. Perfectly she illustrates the fine details of our gilded cage and the shape-shifting slips we make through the bars. Deftly, in poems such as “Horse Sense” and “She Whale,” she enters the animal kingdom to speak of our injustices, and throughout her most powerful collection, “Entering the Mare,” she uses ancient Irish myths to voice suppressed, modern-day, female power. Like the Sheela-na-Gigs she describes so affectingly in “Woman Solstice,” her poems often “dare the eye to recoil,” but though there is no truth that she will not tell, no mood or contrariness she will not admit to, there is nothing brash or unrestrained in Donovan’s writing. Her work has an innate, sleek grace that exposes our human foibles, injustices and tragedies with a judgmental but nonetheless delicate lens. For the most part Donovan employs a plain-speaking tongue. In “Cherry” she writes: “When I woke/for the first morning/into a world/where your breath/no longer stirred,/I wept into the empty basin/of my grief.” Her touch is light and clean, driven by a quick, witty intelligence that is earthed by a loyal commitment to the sensuality of the body. “What Men Are For” opens with the luscious You plunge the nap of your otter’s head down the quiver and pool of my flesh: you come up gasping, with pearls between your teeth. Donovan’s poems are often idea- or image-based, but just when you think language has been relegated to the position of back-seat driver, she sweeps forward with a sudden linguistic fullness or uses an elbow or knee of a word, a jutting, jarring unexpected phrase, that ultimately proves itself to be just the right one. In “Him,” the male washes through the poet’s senses, “tinting me rose and peach/tanging me pineapple.” In “Spits,” a group of young boys snatch her bag and vandalize her car, leaving Donovan wanting “to break their little legs/like wizened sticks/and roast/their marble-sized testicles/on a spit.” Overall the unpredictable, eclectic nature of her language is deeply satisfying. It has all the richness suggested by lines in “Picnic” where the poet offers us “fat beans’ butter on the tongue,/crack of peppercorn; tart of olive,/the succulence of dates.” There are so many qualities to recommend about this book, it’s hard to know where to point the reader toward first. Perhaps not to “Rootling” itself, Donovan’s newest collection, which is placed at the beginning at the book. These poems funnel toward a tragic denouement, the drama of which is best served by first reading the wide-angle early collections where Donovan’s fiercely independent character is equally at home in the streets of Paris, the jungles of Brazil and “the blue crystals” of Fjaerland, Norway. In “Rootling” the focus narrows down to the somewhat cramped confines of family. The new poems chart the realities of child-raising, stillbirth, parental death and, most haunting of all, her husband’s spreading cancer. In its gentler moments “Rootling” is almost a diary of the joy and torment of motherhood, but these charms soon give way to deeper tensions that reveal a sinewy, muscular and courageous book. Ultimately, and with searing honesty, Donovan’s female odyssey is brought to the mythic tragedy within the domestic, and the way a woman’s “span” is both broken and expanded. Rarely has a collection of poems had such a powerful and resonant ending. Its final scene takes place in the shadowy dark of “The Aquarium,” where the poet takes her children to escape the “enclosure” of their horror. The final lines leave us with a moment of exquisite poetic flight, where Donovan transfers the love and grief she feels for her children’s father, to the male seahorse, possessed of a “bony, intelligent face slanting down,/modest and gracious to the last.” Grace Wells is an English poet living in Ireland. Her debut collection, When God Has Been Called Away to Greater Things, was published by Dedalus Press in May 2010. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1852248815http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1906614326http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1906614326Reviews.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1852248815shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3

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