There is a particular kind of courage required to write about family. Not because it is difficult to find the words – it is difficult to find the right ones. The ones that don’t flatten what is complicated, or sentimentalise what is painful. The ones that tell the truth without becoming a verdict. Family Matters, the third Dark Angels poetry anthology, manages this with remarkable consistency across eighteen poets and a collection that feels both intimate and expansive.
The book feels heavy and light at the same time – heavy from the weight of stories it carries, light from the relief of writers who have finally, finally put their dilemmas into words. Lydia Thornley’s silver plait on the cover says everything before you’ve read a word: something braided, something handed down, something that holds its shape even under pressure.
It opens, fittingly, with a haiku. Lucy Beevor’s three lines about soup found in a grandmother’s freezer after her death say more about love and loss than most poets manage in a page.
Inside, the rest of the poems do the same. Neil Baker’s Man and Boy moves between Dartmoor and a café bench with such ease you feel you’ve been on both walks yourself. Jonathan Holt’s That warmth understands that maternal love travels through soup, through hot compresses, through the muscle memory of childhood earaches – and that this is not small. It is enormous. Thérèse Kieran’s poems carry the specific texture of things: silverware, a Donegal shoreline, the particular silence of a winter drive. Stuart Delves’ Wavelength reaches across loss with the urgency of a radio dial being turned in the dark. Tim Rich writes about fathers and strangers with a tenderness that sneaks up on you. And John Simmons, who has spent decades helping others find their voice, turns here to the loss of his own mother – perhaps for the first time on the page.
Then there is Galen O’Hanlon, the collection’s featured poet, whose ten poems form a life entire. He moves from the first dazed nights of new parenthood – the baby sleeping through at 3am while the mind spirals toward death – to watching geese at dusk with his daughter, to his father ageing in a bed full of grey thoughts and black hairs, to his grandfather farming land that held fifty years of silence. O’Hanlon writes about the moon the way people only write about things they have genuinely lost. His is the longest section in the book, and it earns every page.
What Simmons, Kieran and Rich have assembled is not a collection that pretends family is simple. These poems hold grudges and grief, distance and devotion, the long silences and the calls that come too late. But underneath all of it runs something warmer and more stubborn – the recognition that however complicated the geography of family becomes, it remains the most familiar place most of us will ever inhabit. Like realising the place you kept returning to in your mind had a name all along.
Rowena Roberts never got to hold this book. Her two poems are here because great writing insists on being heard, with or without its author.
She left us a line to close on: “And only love remains.”
It does.
You can buy your copy of this beautiful collection direct from its letterpress printer and publisher, Paekakariki Press.
Such a beautifully written review. I hope it will send lots of new readers to the book itself - which is also beautiful in every detail
This is a very very lovely piece of writing.