When I Land in Northern Ireland

When I land in Northern Ireland I long for cigarettes,
for the blue plume of smoke hitting the lung with a thud and, God,
the quickening blood as the stream administers the nicotine.
Stratus shadows darkening the crops
when coming in to land,
coming in to land.

What’s your poison?
A question in a bar
draws me down through a tunnel of years
to a time preserved in a cube of fumes, the seventies-yellowing
walls of remembrance; everyone smokes and talks about the land,
the talk about the land, our spoiled inheritance.

Colette Bryce’s short but incredibly dense poem is shadowed like a lung by history and by collective cultural memory. Squeezing several resonant metaphors into two sestets whose metre contracts and expands like the inhalation and exhalation of breath, the poet creates a language that is both narcotic and necrotised by an ‘inheritance’ that never fully healed.

Precisely anticipating the gratifying swiftness of a next nicotine hit as her aircraft flies into Belfast and her homeland hoves into view, the cloud, or rather the shadowed fields beneath, begin to resolve into the ominous darkness of an X-Ray.

Bryce’s anaemic description of the landscape of seventies bars, of remembrance, and of unending preoccupations, is wrought with great skill: finding a strange beauty that is heavily ironised by the political context, and by the impulse to be drawn into its recall, her images of decline – the cube of fumes, the yellowing paper – are unerringly consistent with a sense of place and time.


‘When I Land in Northern Ireland’ is taken from One for the Road – edited by Stuart Maconie and Helen Mort, published by smith | doorstop (2017)

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