From Artvoice's Rosa Alcalá on Mairéad Byrne's An Educated Heart, available now from Palm Press:

Can we separate world events from more intimate affairs? The language of mass-media from poetry? In her chapbook An Educated Heart, Mairéad Byrne puts into dialogue the 2003 invasion of Iraq—as experienced through the mediation of headlines and news stories—and the pain of personal difficulties, as these infiltrate our language and everyday actions.

Exploring the language of media by cutting it up, the first three poems, “Baghdad,” “Trapped” and “Rubble,” have the effect of physically pushing the reader slowly, inch by inch, toward the center of the city, to see in the “blood-soaked children’s slippers” the aftermath of military destruction, and to feel the weight of a people’s suffering, of an infrastructure in ruin. In these collage poems, it is as if Byrne is piecing together this place, these people, so that we see through the newspeak that often serves to disguise the brutal consequences of the invasion.

Continuing this exploration in “Metaphor, Similes,” also a collage poem, Byrne shows us how the media aestheticizes its language not to make poetry but to “spin” or soften reality, to “tell it slant”: “like grapes from the sky/ like small grapefruit/ metal butterflies…like a doll in a funeral shroud/ like heavy wooden furniture being moved in an empty room.”

Read more from Rosa Alcalá's article by clicking here.

In juxtaposing poem sequences respective to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the breakdown of a family, An Educated Heart raises again the troublesome question of the relationship between the public and the private, in the specific context of a woman’s voice. While the two sequences are clearly delineated, the collection also includes poems which could refer to family life, or war, or both. The poems relating to Iraq are by and large composed of fragments of Internet coverage of the war, and an aesthetic of collage, fragmentation, and brokenness pervades the book.

Mairéad Byrne immigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1994 for reasons of poetry. Her collection Nelson & The Huruburu Bird was published in 2003 by Wild Honey Press. She lives with her two daughters in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches poetry at Rhode Island School of Design.

Source: Rosa Alcalá, Artvoice

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