Isabelle Thompson reviews May Swim by Katie Donovan (Bloodaxe, 2024)
Katie Donovan’s wide-ranging and thoughtful sixth collection holds seemingly oppositional states or entities in balance. In tender and bittersweet poems – sometimes mournful, sometimes joyful, and often both – she shows how things that might seem to be in conflict with each other are actually mutually dependent. Donovan’s great accomplishment is showing that it is from these oppositional states that hope and survival emerge.
One of the most striking thematic pairings in May Swim is that of domesticity and wildness. Poems about wild creatures and pets abound. Nowhere is this more evident than in the long poem, ‘Foxed’. Here, the speaker describes offering food and homeopathic remedy to a fox whose “skin is on fire / with pestilent mites”. As the fox recovers from mange, it becomes bolder, coming in from the garden and entering the house, frightening “the rabbit, / the cats, my children”. The speaker chases it from the house but notes that:
[…] really, he has taken nothing,
just upended our assumption
about what belongs outside,
and what comes in.
Humanity’s relationship with the wild is mediated through such encounters. Bees are rescued with gifts of flowers, flies are ushered out of the “stuffy house” (‘Catching Flies’), jackdaws and frogs are observed in the garden. Indeed, the garden is a central point of focus in these poems, a place where the wild and the homely can intersect and interact.
The garden is also where another of Donovan’s oppositional states is explored. Threat and survival coexist throughout this collection. In ‘The Diggers’, the garden is prepared for the replacement of a septic tank. Through the act of tidying the space, clearing away pots, a bird bath and a trampoline, the speaker meditates on the relationship between destruction and recovery:
I wonder how the daisies will feel,
torn and scattered;
how the earthworms will survive,
torn out of their home.
Change: I scold myself
for cowardice:
I’ve seen enough real graves.
I know the difference.
Many poems examine the climate crisis and human-made damage to ecosystems. ‘Lost Song’, for example, takes on the voice of a whale dying from plastic ingestion. Finally, washed up on the beach, the dying creature is found by a child who, in a moment of irony, says: “Poor whale, […] / You lost your way.” The natural world is shown to be in grave danger thanks to human actions, and yet other poems reveal the fierceness of the wild, its drive to continue. In ‘Invasive’, a man butchers two sycamores with a saw, but
By May, the trees
have dressed their winter wounds
with clusters of mint green leaves,
[…]
not in full sail like before,
thanks to the small man’s
attempt at mastery –
but still magnificent;
and still filtering
the air he breathes.
This idea of survival against the odds is carried forward into poems that explore the relationship between loss and growth. Whether in poems about children growing up, or in poems about the loss of a partner and a mother, something redemptive always persists. ‘Baby Feet’ echoes the famous “Baby shoes: for sale, never worn” story, popularly attributed to Hemingway. However, in Donovan’s poem, the shoes are “hardly used at all”, not due to the death of a child but because “they grew up so fast”. In ‘Signs’, an “amaryllis, / like some geriatric triffid, / is pushing out a swan-necked / neon green bud.”The speaker, given this plant by her now dead mother, tries to read this as a sign that her own “sick” daughter might finally flower. Although she doesn’t succeed in hitting on a “hopeful metaphor”, the act of striving for one is almost good enough. The concept of rescue is prevalent. Even failed rescues are hopeful endeavours that hint at survival in the face of overwhelming threat.
In tender and bittersweet poems – sometimes mournful, sometimes joyful, often both – she shows how things that might seem to be in conflict with each other actually depend on one another for their existence
More topical poems, about pandemic lockdowns or other sociopolitical events, also balance threat and survival, brutality and beauty. ‘May Swim, White Rock, 2020’ depicts a swim taken during lockdown and describes “the clench of fear / released” by the act: “I’m a sea pink / blooming in the rocks.” ‘Let’s Go’, meanwhile, is written in memory of Ashling Murphy, the Irish schoolteacher murdered in 2022. This spare and heartbreaking lyric offers Murphy an escape that she lacked in real life: “Shall we run? / Let’s run away / so it’s never hurt […] Let’s run / like the deer in the mountains”. The exhilarating freedom of the natural world coexists with the unconscionable violence Murphy faced.
In this way, Donovan’s work reveals how states, people and situations can be, and usually are, more than one thing at once, despite society’s insistence on neat categories. An example of this is evident in the humorous presentation of the tension between being a mother and being an artist in ‘Salad Days’:
I’m sorry,
you can’t be a poet anymore –
you aren’t young or sexy now;
[…]
and worst of all,
you’re so peggable as a mum.
‘This Singular Horse’ explores this conflict too, imagining a prehistoric woman making cave art:
I wonder about her children:
as she painted,
did she tell them stories,
so they wouldn’t stray?
In the background of much of this exploration of the relationships between seeming opposites, the sea laps, uncontainable yet immutable and persistent. Just one example of this can be seen in ‘Bailing’, a poem which imagines Noah’s near loss of hope at ever finding dry land: “There must have been a moment / when Noah […] toyed with the easier option / of going down with the flood.”
These are poems about near despair and stubborn hope. What makes May Swim so special is how Donovan reveals these states and entities as symbiotic; we are all connected to each other, to the natural environment, to the generations that preceded us and to those who will follow. The tensions between oppositional states, rather than dividing us, are the very things that bring us together, offer hope, balance us, and create a whole and teeming world.
Isabelle Thompson holds an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University. She has been published or has work forthcoming in a range of magazines including The Interpreter’s House, Stand and The New Welsh Review. She was the winner of the 2022 Poets and Players Competition and a runner up in the 2021 Mslexia Poetry Competition. She tweets @IzzyWithTheCats.
