Seeing Yellow

Empathy, historical awareness and a meticulous attention to detail have long been among the trademarks of Eva Bourke's poetry. In Seeing Yellow, her seventh collection, even in a vignette of her young mother in an unremarkable small railway station, the German-born Galway resident makes her readers mindful of "the disasters and joys" of the past and of those who face them "with nothing but … light luggage". The title poem recalls the failing Pearse Hutchinson in hospital, his visitor, inspired by Van Gogh, bringing the old poet a bunch of sunflowers for his bedside, holding "their rough stalks like torches" for the journey ahead. Though her poetry cannot be reduced to a function, its power to build connections between here and there, now and then, is everywhere evident in a book of heartfelt and graceful expression where "the garden gates of memory" may at any moment swing open, to reveal not so much a distant world as an invitation to see our own in a new light.