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Poem Of The Week: Facing The Music By Mairéad Byrne

Facing the Music

It's not frost; it's snow
It's not backfire; it's gun-fire
It's not fun; it's alcoholism
It's not a tantrum; it's violence
It's not witty; it's abuse
It's not marriage; it's divorce
It's not anger; it's rage
It's not nothing; it's a lump
It's not fear; it's reality
It's not sleep; it's death
It's not au revoir; it's the end

Perhaps the misinterpretation or studied re-appropriation of words and expressions, is allowed a greater degree of latitude in a language as prone to semantic ambiguity as English. Mairéad Byrne's smart exploration of the contrast between articulation and intention, between the way we use language and the inferences we take from it, is concisely rendered here. 'Facing the Music' is both entirely rational and double-handed; familiar yet depressingly frank.

The linguistic games we play in order to avoid painful truths, or to soften the blunt certainties of human conduct and endgame, are worked into a series of increasingly dark, and sardonic, diptychs whose responses entirely overturn each proposition, as if to assert the value of sincerity over the thin gruel of palliation.

'Facing the Music' is taken from You Have to Laugh: New and Selected Poems, published by Barrow Street Press (2013)

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