A Taste for Hemlock by Michle Vassal Alan Garvey I had the pleasure of recently attending a book launch in Dublin

in The Winding Stair, an independent bookshop where books were hung like wind chimes or dream-catchers in the window, exceptional for its picturewindow view of one of the capital citys most attractive landmarks, the Hapenny Bridge. Garlanded with icicle-blue Christmas lights, the view stretched over the dark waters of the Liffey, reflecting the festive lights back at us on the double, while inside the store it was warm and companionable with red wine flowing freely; the air rose with the melodies of flute and harp in accompaniment to a poets reading. It was one of those evenings where people say, You should have been there. It was a brief reading but one that would leave you with a desire to read more. They say good wines dont travel, that ambience is inseparable from the experience but Michle Vassals A Taste for Hemlock is one of those rare exceptions. Vassals previous collection, Sandgames, was published in 2000. The long break of eleven years between the publication of Sandgames and A Taste for Hemlock has had the effect of laying a fine vintage down to rest and mature. A Taste for Hemlock is a significant and sizable collection, which makes it both a delight and maddeningly difficult to review one is left a little like the proverbial child in a candy store, which way to turn next? Reference is made to a painterly sensuality in the blurb at the back of this book, and the authors wide-ranging verbal and visual palette is indeed unavoidable. It is not just a choice of the right word, but the right word that makes for such a luscious use of language. For those who worry about language having a primacy in poetry over that of emotion, A Taste for Hemlock is a well-rounded, full-bodied and mature collection. Theres a Baudelairean sensibility and aesthetic at work in A Taste for Hemlock, a delight in and of the senses, a savouring and appreciation of all that the wide world has to offer, and the bitter flavour attendant on wisdom. Theres also an understanding that the brightest moment of an objects life, whether that be an animal, plant or fruit, or even a human, is just before the turning point of decay or a bruise; but that this is cyclical and to be anticipated is one of our consolations for loss. A Taste for Hemlock is never garish or lurid in its use of colour, nor overbearing; there is a judicious application of colour to evoke a particular sensation. Vassal does not shy away from using charcoals, greyscale, white or black for she demonstrates an awareness that sometimes the best use of colour is in the vacuum of white, a negative space where imagination has room to play or terrify itself, as the case

may be in two poems that sit side-by-side, Chopping wood at dusk and When fog painted the days, where the poet would: gather a whispered presence lacing interstices with silence fleshing the ether with particles of centuries protons of primeval myths etched spirits of frozen grass and ferns amongst the forsaken amongst the prowling shapes of stalking walls Confident enough to plumb the depths of black in her daughters clothing, that necromancers force, to untangle its skeins of colour: viridian green, magenta moons, the malachite, mackerel, lead and gold skies, skies the colour of blood. This is exactly what Vassal has an uncanny ability to do, to draw from the darker side of things and illuminate her observations with a bright clarity that never seems to lose focus, contrast or sharpness, her photo-realism shot through with blasts of hyper-reality. Love and the attentions it requires are dealt with in a most gentle manner, loss, whether it is for good or momentary, is circumscribed in lines as delicate as: I want to forget that I will be alone still tracing the cusp of your absence in our love scrawled bed in the learned curvatures of sleep in the outline of your hand in the outline of your breath Vassal is gloriously awake and alive to possibility and chance, even in the midst of adversity, as in Dog Days, anything can happen when you sit at the edge of stillborn storms swollen and taut veined with rivers and the sky fails you again and again anything can happen Of course, love is not a sepia-tinged series of photographs and it is to Vassals credit that with many of her poems writing of romantic love that

she does not lapse into sentimentality or schmaltz, perhaps it is too keen an awareness that blood will always be drawn: and on my lips your tongue the rose pink blade that slices out my heart The author of A Taste for Hemlock is not just sensual but uninhibitedly sensuous, as anyone who has plucked les fleurs du mal must be I like the stark fact of a poem set in Cork where: we ate nothing but each others shadow drank nothing but nights black milk and tequila and we fucked frozen on a musty floor while the City riverstrapped to the marshes straddled by seventeen bridges succumbed nightly to Beamishs incense of malt and bladder wrack pale pilgrims looking for perfect sins. This is the greatness inherent within Michele Vassals poetry, she is human and brave enough to follow those enigmas and make them transparent with a pellucid light, so that, after our travails and a sojourn in the desert, we become painfully aware yet grateful of what was worth waiting for. Sharp, clever, funny, wonderfully evocative and with more hard-won wisdom than most, this is one of the 2011s best collections of poetry. http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=238&a=171

It is no surprise that the author of A Taste for Hemlock has a book about the poetry of cooking on the back boiler, slowly simmering away.

One of my favourite Calvin and Hobbes strips has to be where Hobbes asks Calvin, So what are we going to do today?, and Calvin replies, Were off to follow the inscrutable exhortations of our hearts. Me, being more akin to the vines brassier cousin, as Al Maginnes put it, would simply exhale (as near the end of Ice Cold in Alex), Worth waiting for.