Rena Fleming, An Spidéal Shoreline and Hillside, printed by CL Print, Connemara, 2024, 24 pages
This small book of poetry is described as “painted with words” by Rena Fleming. There are 30 poems in this chapbook. 8 miniature poems in the section titled Shoreline. The rest are contained in the section Hillside. The poems are created from beautiful nature imagery.
Instead of just selecting an odd phrase here and there from the book—these phrases and images do stand out in the mind’s eye—I want to give the casual reader one of the masterpieces from this book and briefly comment on it. It is characteristic of Ms. Fleming’s stunning poetry. The imagery may seem simple when you become acquainted with it, but it is so right and so beautifully written that I’d be shocked if any reader would just take it for granted or think the presentation was a cliché. No, this poetry is deceptively simple but intricately envisioned. You must have talent, extraordinary talent, to produce this:
Rain Play
Because Tom Goggin
left his umbrella
when he swung by on his way
from Bothuna to Vienna,
I could linger beside the flood
in the field of Steve Padraic Phatch
to watch the carry on.
Above the trees
with their trunks in water,
the raindrops were team players.
They conspired to coalesce
in the evergreen branches,
to wander, gathering,
down the gently sloping channels
and to fall with deliberation
to meet their end
in the One that is water
with a soft emphatic “Plop”.
Each made concentric circles
in the yielding of their singularity,
in the breaking of the surface.
Expanding and waning
each perfect ring,
each soft circular upslope and down,
bright to one side,
dark to the other
was interrupted by the next.
The restless rain, playing thus,
spread patterns in wheeling motion
across the tree roofed corner.
The same rain,
without collaborating trees,
pelted on the shade less side,
pelted like pebbles,
hopping back a good inch.
The constant aqueous
flinging, springing, recreating
looked like a bed of fairground nails,
shining at the tips.
The pelting made hard “Pings”.
To counter the mellifluous “Plops”.
More rain drops played staccato
on Tom Goggin’s umbrella.
I hoped it wasn’t raining
In Vienna.
Tom Goggin is the name of the owner of the umbrella in the first stanza. I don’t think his name has any symbolic importance. “From Bothuna to Vienna”—I believe these locations are in the west of Ireland. Vienna could be Vienna, Austria, but probably not. On the internet, you can go to a page that discusses a walk from the small town of Spiddal in Ireland up through Bothuna, a town north of Spiddal. There is a note on this website that says:
A. Starting from Spiddal Village, travel west 350m (4min) on the right-hand footpath over the bridge and past the stone walls and wooded gardens of Spiddal House.
B. Turn right at the crossroads into Bothúna. The name derives from a cottage or ‘bothán’ owned by a lady called Úna or Chúna. Follow this road uphill for 1.8km (22-30 min) towards Seanamhóinín.
(The link for curious people: Walk: Bothúna – Seanamhóinín – Sailechúna – Cumann Forbartha Chois Fharraige
Do Goggin and these place names matter to a foreign reader? Not really. If you were a tourist in Spiddal, it would be nice to know and perhaps become acquainted with the actual places named, but it doesn’t matter for the poetic meaning of the poem. It would be good to adopt an Irish accent and sound out the names to catch the spirit of Ireland in the air, but unless you are there, the exact location is not that important.
The mastery of the poem for English speakers the world-over begins in Stanza two. The imagery is clear. Also, read the poem out loud. There are subtle sounds in this poem. The word “trunks” in the second line hints at a plop of rain. Though trunks has nothing to do with raindrops physically, aurally, the word suggests them. And this is before the word “raindrop” is even mentioned. The consonants and vowels line up in syncopated sound—trees-team-evergreen and “conspired to coalesce” and then the n’s and ells: “gently sloping channels”—fall—deliberation. I know this may seem like splitting analytic hairs, but the stanza possesses that march of sound down to the words “One that is water / with a soft emphatic ‘Plop’.” Not only visually but aurally, the words produce the sensation of the phenomena expressed. Also, the words can be analyzed philosophically. One could mean God as well as the metaphoric existence of water.
Stanza Three gives a great description of the concentric circles produced by drops of rain. Ms. Fleming has an eye for such details and makes them real to the reader. Stanza four has its image of “pelted like pebbles”. Again, the sound of the words echoes the physical reality. Stanza five presents the harmony of “hard “Pings” and “mellifluous “Plops”.
The poem is a whole of sound, vision, idea, and motion. The umbrella is an instrument on which the raindrops played staccato. I think you can hear them falling on the umbrella. The name Tom Goggin echoes that sound.
The other poems in the book have the play of sound and the visual clarity of this poem. They are a delight to read.
If anyone is interested in purchasing a copy of this book, email me through the Loch Raven Review. I will send Rena Fleming your email, and she can arrange for you to buy it. The going price in Ireland is 8 Euros.
© Rena Fleming and Dan Cuddy
Rena Fleming was born on a farm in Co.Limerick. She has been living in Co. Galway since 1990. She has studied and worked in weaving, textile design, and painting. She began to write a few years ago and has been writing poetry and some stories since. Her poems have been published in many poetry magazines. Her other book, Somebody and Nobody, was published in 2023 in Ireland.
Dan Cuddy is currently an editor of the Loch Raven Review. In the past, he was a contributing editor of the Maryland Poetry Review and Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. His book of poetry, Handprint on the Window, was published in 2003. Recently, he has had poems published in Super Poetry Highway, Literary Heist, Horror Sleaze Trash, Poetry in Chewers by Masticadores, Roanoke Review, the Amethyst Review, Synchronized Chaos, Fixator Press, The Manor Mill Anthology, Gargoyle, Witcraft, and the WE Anthology.
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