Out of its own husk

In her essay ‘The Irish Woman Poet’, Eavan Boland (herself considered Ireland’s greatest female poet) noted that ‘The life of the Irish woman – the ordinary lived life – was both invisible and, when it became visible, was considered inappropriate as a theme for Irish poetry.’ The only place within poetry for an Irish woman, history seemed to insist, was as either muse or myth. Any hint of her as a flesh-and-blood creature was effectively erased.

Irish writer Anne Enright’s eighth novel, The Wren, The Wren, is a complex and compelling expansion on Boland’s thesis. Possibly Enright’s best work since her Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007), The Wren, The Wren encapsulates the slow but steady evolution of a family and, by extension, a nation over the course of three generations. Enright’s composition of the novel, its weaving back and forth between generations of the McDaragh family, is fluent and intricate, the full significance of the novel only revealing itself when its last words – ‘If we are very lucky, the bird will always be the bird’ – have been placed.