The Colour of Time

The Colour of Time, a debut collection by the Irish poet Úna Ní Cheallaigh, opens with the poem “Guest,” which begins: “The grey shed door has swung open / and, crazed pendulum, it beats / against the metal drainpipe.” A few lines down, we observe “the disturbed contents of two old tea chests: / telegrams, folded letters, opened, scattered, / become fragments.” Along with the “grey shed door” Cheallaigh opens, also, a door into the past and into the histories of people—especially women—whose lives have been affected by war, though their experiences are not part of official history books and records, 

Only you know why you joined The Leinsters back then 
and all we ever knew about you was your name.

The last address was a wood, southeast of Menin Road, 
no letters sent—no one mentioned you were there.

Your war medal resting in the attic of ‘Windele Road’ 
while you waited one hundred years at Menin Gate.

The collection abounds with persona poems and poems written after works of literature or art. Some are ekphrastic, while others speculate on a specific moment in an artist’s life. In “Brecht’s Last House,”

He’s sitting
at a worn desk by the window 
looking down 
on Chausséestrasse 
and the cemetery beyond

writing no more epic plays but poetry 
his first love,

Several poems are dedicated to French sculptor Camille Claudel (1864–1943), who was committed to an asylum in 1913 after having destroyed many of her own artworks. The poems in this section are remarkably tender and empathetic. Cheallaigh gives Claudel the agency to speak about her illness, her work, and her desire to continue to create despite her situation:

Times when it’s so hard I cannot bear it—

I rub stale bread between my fingers, 
feel the curve of cold tin plates,

my hands longing for clay to mould the pain, 
to cast their vacant eyes, their bitten nails.

Speaking across disciplines––history, visual art, literature—the lyrical elegies of The Colour of Time form a beautiful mosaic through which to reimagine the past.