Everything Far Becomes Near by Ann Conway
Finch and Fellow, 2019
In Ann Conway’s first collection of poems, we come across characters and landscapes that are immediate, visceral, and familiar: Conway’s subjects are her family and her schools, the towns of Rhode Island, Bergen Street, “petunias and the bridal wreath bush in the yard.” What she uncovers in her work of remembering, with specific, felt details, is a family history that is both frightening and illuminating, raw and real, fleshly and unforgettable. It is in what and how Conway remembers—how she puts together this commonplace book of recollections and revelations—that she discovers how deep her love runs for her family and her life history, and how that love reveals and restores what could simply be grief and loss.
Conway’s work is a welcome addition to the chronicling of trauma and economic despair that threads the seams of Irish-American history and literature. The dramas of Conway’s household, her parents’ “histories…tight vises around the soul,” were also extensions of national history, of being Irish and working class in the 1970s, Conway’s neighborhoods packed with “old tenements: boiled meat, hardship, age.” These characters, while nameless, add to the mythological feel of Conway’s childhood; her working-class neighbors were “wild men and women who cared not too much for this hard world,” their paychecks spent at the neighborhood bars, “those sharp-witted realists as pungent as sour beer, spent Pall Malls.” It’s a landscape that Marie Howe might recognize from her childhood, or that Eugene O’Neil might have set one of his own familial epics.
And what she experienced was this: her parents were in late-middle age when she was born, and her father ran a porn store to “spite” her Catholic mother, who “knew Latin and Greek at 16,” but “lost all her teeth at 19.” When Conway’s mother died in old age, she threatened to “come back as a wild wolf!” When Conway’s brother Terry “dug a swimming pool” in their back yard, the neighborhood kids wondered if he was insane; Conway eventually brings us to visit Terry in his psych ward room, “strung out, raped, toothless at 30.”
What helps Conway see, and hear, in this familial history is, surprisingly, her own deafness; Conway writes about her inability to physically hear as a way to sense what is precious and untouchable in these “tales of woe and vengeance,” her brother’s insanity, her parents’ wild, fearful presences. “I welcome silence,” she writes, “though / who knows how to hear my story?” In that question, we know the answer: it is Conway who knows how to hear, despite deafness, how to “love the sort of people I fled as a girl.” And in her decision to love, we also see Terry, and her parents, with what Conway calls “a sort of reverence,” with “distilled love.” Conway’s work will leave you silent, but open, able to hear more deeply, “down to the bone.”
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Allison Backous Troy is an essayist and educator living in Grand Junction, CO. Her essays and reviews have been published in Image, Saint Katherine Review, Crab Orchard Review, River Teeth, and Duke Divinity’s Faith and Leadership blog. She holds an M.F.A. from Seattle Pacific University and is working on her first collection of poems.