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Sara Berkeley Tolchin's new collection of poems begins: 'I'd like my heart / to be without conditions, / to crack each day a little more open,' an ambition these vibrant, airy poems explore in the book's copious reach. It reflects on themes of loss and losing: 'My mother is missing. The stars too, / the stars are not where I left them, / they are not in their constellations.'


As Wes Davis observed, in his Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, 'her rich poems ' and her sharp eye for details of the natural world ' are given a resonant tension by the stretched ties to her native country.' What Just Happened includes poems set on the west coasts of Ireland and the United States. But 'the rumble beneath her poetic language,' Davis continues, 'is most often the noise made by the tectonic plates of personality as they shift beneath the surface terrain of relationships.'


Flights ' actual and imaginary ' embrace a search for 'true north, / the secret heart of all things.' Though they address places where 'much hurt comes to rest' they sing 'O holy life' and frame a time that was 'a good day . . . full of miracles.'


Review


'Tolchin's rich poemsand her sharp eye for details of the natural worldare given a resonant tension by the stretched ties to her native country.... The rumble beneath her poetic language is most often the noise made by the tectonic plates of personality as they shift beneath the surface terrain of relationships.' (Wes Davis
Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry)

The title of Sara Berkeley Tolchin's What Just Happened catches the way in which her poems emerge out of events and moments when the poet is caught unawares or somehow reminded of another life. Berkeley Tolchin's sense of vocation is both process-based and serious. If something happens that can be made into a poem, she seems to be saying, it is her work to make that poem. That sense of openness informs all of her work and it is no surprise that so many of her poems take place in in-between spaces, in car-parks and on beaches, or that she is often mid-journey when she writes, flying across the US, driving or sailing. Many of her poems are strengthened by an undertow of sadness which the poems acknowledge without being overwhelmed by, as in fine poems about patients she has nursed, a pair of elegies, The Last Word and On Not Scattering Michael's Ashes in Death Valley, and a series of poems about mothers and daughters. (John McAuliffe
Irish Times, August 8, 2015)

I know only two Irish poets who emerged into public consciousness while in their late teens with their core poetic voice fully formed. The first was Michael Hartnett whose early poems can still live alongside - and throw light on - his great later work. The other poet, Sara Berkeley, was a Dublin schoolgirl in 1986 when her vivid poems attracted national attention, due to the same sense that she already had a completely formed voice. Her voice has deepened in the decades since, as the superb poems in this - her sixth collection - testify. Boris Pasternak once noted, 'To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field' - and Berkeley's voice is enriched here by confronting issues of loss and grief without ever losing that spacious and deeply considered understatement which lies at the heart of her work. This careful avoidance of pyrotechnics or superfluous flourishes roots her work deeply into a reality that is at once everyday and yet utterly changed as much by what is left unsaid as what she says. You see it in the title poem here. It explores a relationship in the aftermath of an unnamed rift after which nothing has changed on the surface and yet 'We are in a different place now! t