Famished
by Cherry Smyth
£10 (pub. 2019)

This collection is startling. More than that, it is vitally important. Combining lyrical poetry with statistics, quotes, newspaper cuttings, snippets of conversation and even nursery rhymes, it charts the Irish Famine from the potato blight and the impossible poverty that followed, through the disease and death on a massive scale, the political decisions that worsened an already dreadful situation, to the people forced to pay passage to North America and Australia on freight ships, known as ‘coffin ships’. Finally, Cherry Smyth evokes the current day as she describes the journey into her country’s past, its language and the ‘plot of scarcity’ that decimated a nation – a scarcity that bears no little comparison to the plight of political and economic refugees today.

A trailer for the stage performance based on Famished can be seen here.
An interview with Cherry about Famished, including excerpts from the stage show, broadcast by Radio Ulster on 17 May 2019, can be heard here (interview starts about 14 mins in).
An article in The Irish Times reviewing the show can be read here
And an interview with Cherry in the Honest Ulsterman Magazine can be seen here.

Reviews of Famished:

"Famished, a recent collection of poetry by Cherry Smyth, is a deep road into the Irish famine. Her poems may begin with the 1840s but they travel right up to contemporary politics. Alongside her own writing, she quotes from political commentators down the decades. The poem ‘The Cassock, Each and Every Townland’ is accompanied by a quote from the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle writing around the time of the famine: ‘Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it – by heavens – squelch it.’

There is anger in these poems, and accusation, but largely grief, a sense that Ireland and Britain have still not inhaled the horrors of what happened. And, as a result, we are all the poorer at reacting when power and abuse mingle mischievously again today.  […]

We are reminded of the tragedy of the events, of Ireland's latent anger against British elites, something many people had all but let go after the Good Friday Agreement. Brexit is creating a space again for this kind of analysis. If only they knew. [...]

Famished does compel you to reflect on the tragedy of the famine and on its shadow in contemporary politics. Towards the end, Smyth introduces an uncomfortable idea: ‘I am born of those who ate… Did they hoard or share?’ The guilt swings both ways. What did one’s ancestors have to do to survive this calamity?
And what is this atrocity’s wider legacy? It killed our ancestors, displaced them, decimated the Irish language, spawned Irish-America, forced the march towards independence, changed our land laws, and further embedded the effects of colonisation – a centralised power system and a lack of confidence in our own thinking and decision-making. The suggestion of Famished is that we have still not dealt with any of this. If we look at our paralysis with regard to housing and health, it is difficult to argue with that. And yet, in the cultural life of Ireland, you see that we have responded to our past quite directly, and in many unexpected ways.

Famished – assertive, exploratory – is a forthright contribution to the national dialogue, if only Ireland had one."

- Toner Quinn in The Journal of Music

"When I was sixteen, I skipped after-school study with a group of friends to drive to the boy’s secondary school and throw eggs at their cars. It was part of a pranking tradition that happened towards the end of secondary school in our small town of Bandon in Ireland. When the boys retaliated the next day, we were screamed at by our vice-principal, and sent to our class head teachers for punishment. I went alone to see Mr. O’Sullivan, an ex-monk religion and history teacher, while the other girls went to see their much less earnest (and female) heads. Mr. O’Sullivan listened to me while I panic told my story, he paused after, and with his notorious intensity doled out his punishment. He asked me to go to the Famine graveyard, a ten-minute walk from our school, he told me to go, and pray for people who did not have eggs to survive, let alone throw at cars for fun. Fifteen years later, I went.

I’ve written one poem about my visit to that Famine graveyard. It took months, and endless rewrites, and it still doesn’t capture a morsel of the feelings I experienced. In Cherry Smyth’s 2019 collection Famished (Pindrop Press, UK: 2019), she manages to encapsulate the intergenerational trauma of the Famine (An Gorta Mór) in over fifty poems. Her extensive research and lyrical mastery creates a poetics that conveys the harrowing shame, and the derealisation, that occupies the historical and contemporary accounts of an event that goes partway towards explaining why I am writing this review in English.

Throughout the collection, Smyth regularly extends the space between words, illuminating the white of the page, creating this in-between emptiness, leaving space for a lost language and people. Liminal spaces, thresholds, and states reoccur throughout many of the poems in this devastating collection. In ‘A Stethoscope, Murrisk’ (37), the lintel (which supports the space between the door and the roof) of the demolished houses frames those who died in isolation, in an exercise of self-tombing.

In ‘An Gorta Mór, All Over Ireland’ (39), the ditch, or the space between the road and field, provides “a soft bed / made a short rest last forever.” Smyth refers to Ireland as a “morgue state”: “We rule this morgue state” (41), conceptualising the image of a country full of people in a state of waiting between death and a resting place. The sonic quality of ‘Plague-Breath, Everywhere,’ (50) keens through the pages, a hauntological sound like a Banshee, reminding us of lost futures.

Famished has echoes of Patricia Smith’s 2008 collection Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press), based around the travesties that occurred during Hurricane Katrina. Both collections call on spatial temporality to create a typographic journey across geographic and historical boundaries. The line “To be unfamilied. / Is that the shame?” in ‘A Serving Spoon, Melbourne’ (70), reiterates the lost generation, the lost future of Ireland. I felt a contemporary connection to queer theory literature on anti-futurism, indebted to Leo Bersani’s 1987 article ‘Is This Rectum a Grave?,’ which challenges heteronormative assumptions around reproduction. As a queer writer from a Protestant upbringing in Portstewart, Northern Ireland, Smyth provides a perspective from the lesser heard fractions of Irish society, where there can often be silence and erasure around anything that is not heterosexual and/or Catholic."

- Emer Lyons on queenmobs.com

"I just finished a cover-to-cover read of Cherry Smyth's dazzling, heart-breaking Famished. It's hard enough to read, so goodness knows how the poet lived with that material for so long.  This work encompasses (& shows the interconnectedness) of so much, socially, politically & personally: economics, the social order, racism, immigration, empire, war crimes, even ecological disaster."

- Emily Critchley

Other praise for Famished:

“Famished is a powerful read. I can only imagine the extraordinary work of composition and transformation that Cherry Smyth must have gone through to turn such extensive, and what must have been pretty harrowing, research – historical and haptic – into such a finely crafted map of poems. It is a brave book. It should be handed out at tube stations. Lest we forget, not simply that it happened (and it happened like this, and it continues to happen) but also lest we forget the complicity of forgetting itself. Thank you, Cherry Smyth, for the reminder.”

– Brigid McLeer

“So much sorrow and complexity – reading this I felt as though I was being tossed in a turbulent sea, without gravity yet leaden, held down by the legacy of history – struggling for breath. The stuff of revolutions!”

– Anne Tallentire

“Famished is devastating yet measured, profound yet curious, elegant and full of compassion, solidarity and momentary sparkles of humour - it’s such a gift.”

– Mikhail Karikis