On the Death of an Absent Father
It is a very different thing to remember a place
while it still stands,
even as a ramshackle ruin,
than to remember it once it has been torn down.
The long corridor from the toilets
to the dancefloor, where we sat for hours
surreptitiously pouring vodka from the naggins
in our handbags into our glasses,
is gone.
The Warwick Hotel, broken and dilapidated,
invisible for an age as we drove past it, forgetting
how little hope we had as we attempted to launch ourselves
from the dirty carpet, how little hope
as we adorned the pitiful world with laughter.
The Warwick Hotel is gone. It is an empty plot
that someone will force a future on.
Rachel Coventry
****
The latest collection by the Galway-based poet Rachel Coventry, The Detachable Heart, has its share of sensuously down-to-earth love poems, more than a few of which are spiked with disenchantment. There are images of love as damage, and, in the title poem, the disclosure of both the wound and its healing becomes for the speaker an enabler of poetry (“I will wear the scar proudly. / It will be my next collection”). The last line of The Detachable Heart, in a poem called Punishment, fearlessly proclaims its edict: “Let the ferocious heart love,” having insisted that, despite the lover’s depiction as an “old Tantalus”, “the heart wants what it wants”.
Coventry is a realist, for all the heartfulness and sexiness in her poems, and often at her strongest when she confronts the harsher disappointments time delivers: death, family illness, change. She can deal with these subjects both directly and obliquely. On the Death of an Absent Father spells out the gap between the promise of the title and the actual contents. No father, no death, greets the reader. But the demolished hotel and the memories it evokes summon up the more significant loss.
So the first verse asserts, between the lines, the distinction between reacting to an errant but still living parent and reacting to the absolute absence that is their death. The hotel, even as a “ramshackle ruin”, is easier on the mind than the space its demolition leaves, more able to call up memories and nostalgia than the deserted space.
Coventry, it must be said, resists the nostalgia temptation. Her second stanza describes trepidation rather than enviable excitement. The friends – this is a poem of collective as well as personal experience – sit “for hours” in “the long corridor from the toilets / to the dancefloor”. They are getting up their nerve by “surreptitiously pouring vodka from the naggins / in our handbags into our glasses” (“naggins” being a small measure of spirit). This was what going dancing was really like, the poem’s telling us: it was a slightly desperate effort rather than an achieved thrill of freedom.
In the third verse, the hotel becomes invisible and forgotten “for an age”. The perspective now is that of adult(s), driving repeatedly past a hotel now, ironically, named for the first time: the Warwick Hotel. The friends have forgotten the sadness it has come to represent: they have forgotten “how little hope we had”. But the speaker remembers. Her images, memorably awkward, show young women who tried to “launch” themselves “from that dirty carpet” and “adorned the pitiful world with laughter”. Both “launch” and “adorn” are verbs that suggest ambition but the poet knocks such aspiration flat with the reality of the “dirty carpet” and “the pitiful world” – and the repeated comment, “how little hope”. The tone is regretful but with a flare of angry scorn.
As the adult narrator looks back, the hotel seems to represent a state of failed development. The disappearance of its “long corridor” in the last line of the second stanza suggests there was no time to complete the distance, enter the dancehall where hopes might have been ignited. In a brief, decisive final stanza, “The Warwick Hotel is gone” and is nothing but “an empty plot”. The plot is the patch of land where the hotel stood, “that someone will force a future on”. We can imagine a property developer moving in and cashing in. But it’s more than that, I think: the potent verb “force” suggests exploitation of the women themselves.
Perhaps, though, it’s also implied that, in a different age and setting, on the ground where the speaker once stood, other women will provide the “force”. They will determinedly make their own future, as the speaker has had to, overcoming the limits imposed by failed structures – social and economic. Finally, I see a glimmer of optimism. The future simply can’t be taken away from a word like “future” – and its use now helps the poem to repair the damage it has so coolly and cleverly symbolised.
You can read more about Coventry’s life and work in her interview here.