A Note about Shadowlands by Hugh McFadden

Shadowlands, the sixth collection of poetry by Kieran Beville, takes its title from the book and movie about the writer C.S. Lewis, whose book ‘A Grief Observed’, chronicled the psychic pain caused by the death of his wife.

Kieran Beville, in these mature poems on the human condition of life and loss, love and grief, has captured the Zeitgeist of our tragic age, with insightful imagery and without any sentimentality.

As the poet John Liddy observed about this author’s previous collection, A Place Apart, trawling through memories of meaningful past moments in life is often the leitmotif of Beville’s work. In Shadowlands he addresses such moments under the rubric or methodology of the awareness of loss, in four sections: ‘Loss of Innocence’, ‘Loss in Love’, ‘Loss of Life’, ‘Loss of Humanity’.

The book’s striking cover image, ‘Moonlight on the Lake’, taken from the painting by the English Victorian landscape artist John Atkinson, sets a suitably elegant and melancholic atmosphere for these moving poems.

In Section 1: Loss of Innocence, several verses registered strongly with me, including Greying Embers (‘Like memories that once burned hot’), and All Soul’s Day (on mortality and the idea of the immortality of the soul).

Section 2: Loss in Love, illustrates that ‘love’, like ‘beauty’, is difficult. The poem Dead Star captures the ghostly quality of contemplation of love lost: ‘The sky sparkled like sequins/ on the black dress she wore/ The last time we danced’.

Section 3: Loss of Life contains many moving verses about death and grieving. Cup of Grief, and the poem, Waiting, are two that capture the anguish of final loss that seems beyond human consolation.

There is great grief also in the last section, Loss of Humanity, whose verses lament the immense catastrophe of the current destruction of Gaza by Israel’s armed forces: in such poems as The Desolation of Abraham’s Children, and The Second Nakba: (‘…refugees who/ wrapped their mutilated dead/ in burial rags / The lame and blind/ condemned to hobble and grope/ through history, in search of hope. All this, in Gaza, a land where hope and history do not rhyme.

 Hugh McFadden (poet and literary critic)

 

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