title: The Wren, the Wren by: Enright, Anne published: 2023-08-31 read: 2023-09 preview

I am a lost cause for poetry. It is not my thing. OK, I like and know the Jabberwocky, but that’s about it.

So one would think that this is not a book for me. It focusses around poetry by Carmel’s well-known grandfather poet. Like this:

Migrations It is October. White-fronted geese are back in The North Slob, pink footed, greylag, Whooper swan, beating the air over Donegal to Carlingford Lough. All over Ireland, the birds are wintering down. In the family grave at Killiskea, my cold mother and her cold sister disagree in death, as they like to do. I am the last of them, servant of the line, bird keeper. I pick a fallen quill from the strand at Omey look to the sea for ink.

Leaving out the newlines.

So. The wren, the wren describes the story of Carmel and Nell, taking turns in subsequent chapters. Nell is Carmel’s daughter from a short fling her mother had with a student, while they were in their twenties. So we learn in part II, “Carmel”. By then, Carmel had gotten rid of her father: hedied, after eloping from Ireland to the US and leaving wife and two daughters behind:

Carmel turned to look at the American wife, who was three rows behind them, fumbling through the specially printed missalette. Because, as everyone in the church knew and no one knew how to say, Phil’s foreign divorce had been followed within weeks by a foreign marriage in New York’s City Hall. This fact was not mentioned by anyone on the altar, certainly not by the poet from Cork, though the priest shifted to a ‘special’ voice to say, ‘and all those Phil loved, including his dear friends across the pond’.

And her mother died from breast cancer, otherwise without much of a character. Carmel first has many boyfriends:

MOST OF THE time, when Carmel slept with someone, it was because her period was due. She woke up one morning with a man in the bed and, when she went out to the bathroom, the blood was right there – as though he had poked it out of her. For which she was often grateful. So that’s what was going on. ‘Good morning!’ An odd bunch, over the years, her former lovers. You wouldn’t exactly invite them to the same party – or to any party, some of them – though she was a bit of an outlier herself, Carmel realised.

but her life changes because of Eduardo, whom she sleeps with after having basically given up sex:

After the first rush of it – the push of his thigh, the slip of his tongue – Carmel started to notice his hand as he placed it here or there. Her skin going wrong. Her body souring at his touch. It was always so unpleasant, the moment when desire turned into the opposite of desire. She wished she’d had a few drinks, to get her over the hump.
…
Afterwards, she wondered if this was what everyone talked about when they talked so incessantly about sex. She did not think it was. This was not perversion or pleasure, it was huge and empty and, at the bright, distant edge of it, a feeling of agony, almost. She thought if it happened again, she might not survive it.
…
‘At home, I have a woman,’ he said. ‘I am sure you do.’ It was unconscionable. It was completely unprofessional. And it made her pregnant – a fact she decided not to discover until some weeks after she had mislaid his file. Carmel was an unusual person. Everyone said so. ‘God you’re great,’ they said. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ When her bump began to show, at around four months, they stopped saying anything, and Carmel was happy to find that she had started to hate them all.
…
Because birth was not the end of pregnancy, she thought, it was just pregnancy externalised.

Her life changes, because of the birth of Carmel’s daughter, Nell. Whom we got to know in Part I of the book, “Nell”:

I wonder what was going through her boyfriend’s mind at these moments. Let’s get insured! or: Why is she ignoring me? or: Oh my god her breasts. or: I need to insure this bitch before I murder her, goddammit. or: If we switched providers there could be significant reduction in costs. Perhaps if I made a spreadsheet she would see the potential risks and also the savings to be made. or: If I talk about insurance I don’t have to think about my erection.
…
Downstairs, when I sit on the loo, I see the black dots of his thumb-marks on my inner thighs and the sight looses in me a jagged run of pleasure. It is the same feeling I got from self-harming – for the thirty seconds or so I self-harmed at school. A skitter of something that settles into a single word: Mine.

And then, some female power (-less) I recognise, it got and gets thrown at me all the time:

Felim does the same thing around my room, in the morning there are always leftovers for me to clear. What is that? Is it a power play, a hoarding impulse? ADHD? Is it male entitlement? I have seen him try to finish something, decide against finishing it, set it down and walk away.

While I myself think, Apologies, partners of past and present, it was not meant that way, Nell thinks, I think, I am his leavings. I am the thing he can not finish or throw away.

The story continues, with Carmel, how then she gets pregnant. And we know where that went: Nell.

The book continues in the fashion, and even has an interlude in a chapter called Phil. The name of Nell’s grandfather, Carmel’s father, the poet. And suddenly things start coming together. Yes, he left Carmel’s mother, went to Greece for a girlfriend, then went to the US for a wife, and happily – or not – lived his life ever after. We start to understand his leaving, seen by Carmel, as he mentioned it in an interview while he lived in the US:

Phil spoke about bluebells, the difference of the American woods to the spongy bogs of Offaly, and how he missed the wren here, he missed the smallness of Irish birds, and the wren especially who was the king of them all. He mentioned courting his wife, who had walked with him though bluebell woods when he was a young man. She was from Dublin and unfamiliar with the countryside, and that, in a way, was what his early poetry was for. It was his gift to her. A posy. No, What was the word? A nosegay. They lived together in Dublin for some time he said, but she got sick, unfortunately, and the marriage did not survive. Carmel pressed pause. Went back. ‘tunately, and the marriage …’ he looked sadly down. ‘Did not survive.’ ‘Unfortunately,’ she said.

“She got sick.” Dear reader, observations all differ. Memories all differ. It doesn’t mean much. You try to puzzle history together, even if it is just your own life. And try to understand, why did I take that decision in that moment? Why did I hurt that person? Was I right, or were they? Am I right, or are they?

“The wren, the wren” – the name of one of the poems of Phil – gives us a family saga, beautifully lived by Carmel and Nell. Which daughter loves her mother, unconditionally? Which mother can let her daughter go and see her experience the same pain she did? Do parents repeatedly make the same choices? History repeats itself, we all know that, we all live that, and we try to be the best parents we can in the meantime.

Luckily, by definition we are.