Éadaoín Lynch’s debut pamphlet Fierce Scrow contends with the earthy and the elemental. Taking the reader through the beautiful and bleak Burren landscape, these poems reflect place as a memory, from ancient ruins to lost connections to place names themselves. With adept shifts in tone and language,Lynch plays with a postcolonial inheritance and a queer resistance, showing a keen awareness of their heritage and their legacy – ‘Living between one bow stroke and the next.’
In this pamphlet, we traverse an igneous landscape of rock and water, full of clefts. Lynch prises these open like bread, leaving the flames of myth and chosen elders to leap up into the air, to flicker quick and blue, to reveal them to be still singing, still blooming on the craggy edge, 'weighted / with borrowed time'.
-Stephanie Sy-Quia
Beginning in foam and flames, this is an alchemical work of love, labour and loss,
fuelled by the particulate and pharmakon matters of language. Nothing here is stable
and even ‘tradition’ must ‘be / negotiated over the torrent’; poetic form meanders,
hardens, sparks and drifts within the pressurised field of the ‘I’/‘eye’ whose ‘present’
is a brilliant, showy display. This book reminds us that desire, intimacy and memory
are inextricable from the more-than-human worlds in which we cling precariously to
meaning and as poets work with the titular zeal, the fierce scrow, to live, know and
write better. Very quickly I found myself attuned to the ‘humming’ ofLynch’s
wordplay, the way kin longing, geological time and the sensuous present converse in
a weathering lyric. Fierce Scrow’s ‘troubled language’ blooms in the queer bodywork
of these poems, their metamorphic ‘resilience’, their nomenclature of the intimate
and lithic. A poetry of blossoming, exposure and study; a poetry of reincarnation and
break.
— Maria Sledmere, author of String Feeling (2022)
Éadaoín Lynch
Éadaoín Lynch is an Irish poet & researcher based in Edinburgh, whose work has been published previously in Icarus, The Kindling Journal, the Fawn Press anthology Elements, and also shortlisted for the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and the London Magazine Poetry Prize. Éadaoín is lead and co-director ofRe·creation, a queer poetry development project and anthology (launching June 2022 with Stewed Rhubarb Press).Find them online atwww.eadaoinlynch.comand on twitter@eadaoinlynch.
body (n.)
from Old English ‘Bodig,’ meaning ‘[a man’s] chest,’
extended to denote a person’s form in later 13th century
Adam’s rib and a calcium breath are not the truth.
I found hope there; calcite deposits in a dank cave
have more relevance, stalactite antiques hanging
hollow over shifting ground. Chesty origins seem
fitting when I cannot fit into body made from a hidden word,
sound created from a parenthesis of agendas,
shaped from a man long forgotten, renamed, reborn,
like Eve, scapegoated into submission.
My body has proved a part-time living, fig-leafed
with troubled language, blooming
from a man’s chest, a woman’s womb, a woman’s biblical
misunderstanding: living proof my form is
manlier than most. Broad shoulders, butch
reclining. The word handsome has beheld & held me,
its gloss subdividing into sense—striking,
imposing, substantial: how kind of the masculine
forms to make space for me.
Bone of my bone after all flesh of my flesh.
