where the lost things go–poems by Anne Casey

where the lost things go

Anne Casey

Published 2017 by Salmon Poetry

available on Amazon

where the lost things go, poems about the ever-unsettled feeling of the immigrant, in this case, the poet’s move from Ireland to Australia, brings us back to the music and rhyme we loved as children, what brought us to poetry in the first place. Hear it in her poem, In memoriam l: Made in Miltown Mallbay: The air ajangle

With the clang

And clink and rasp

I am agasp

Her poems bring us back to the elemental, a time when our senses were “searing,” our hearts “ablaze.”

Casey can bring tears to your eyes. In memoriam ll: The draper, she writes:

In every emigrant’s case

Their mother’s broken heart

Sorrow is dealt with quietly, in the ordinariness of everyday life. In memoriam XIV: Plus ça change, she writes:

In Belfast on the 6 o’clock news

A nine-year-old boy hit in the head

With a stray bullet

And you’re scraping the last of the

Dripping beans onto your soggy crust

Trying not to think of brains

She has the gift of being able to choose the perfect details to characterize the people in her world and their relationships as she does in Memoriam V: Lawful Wedded

For fifty-three years

He held her coat

Brought around the car

And opened her door.

Whether Casey is writing about her childhood or the fears and delights of raising children, you find yourself smiling and nodding and saying, “Yes, oh, yes. That’s just the way it is.”