Review of Fire: Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan & Niamh Boyce, Arlen House 2024

[sheenaghpugh]

This is an anthology of poems, prose pieces and artwork celebrating “the sacred feminine, Brigid, and the heritage of Kildare”.  It becomes obvious quite soon that “Brigid” is but one avatar in a long line of female figures of worship going back through mythology to the great Asian goddess variously known as Cybele, Isis, Lady, Mother and much else. The “brideog” dolls which are dressed in white and resemble slightly potato-faced children were once made of straw, which betrays their origin as corn-doll fertility symbols.  Indeed Katie Donovan’s poem “Charm” references not Brigid but that other famous feminine symbol Venus of Willendorf, “totem of pleasure and plenty”, powerfully contrasting her “yeasty curves” with the stick-thinness of starvation or anorexia. Jesse Hill’s macaronic “Selkie, Find Your Skin” uses the Scottish Gaelic myth of the seal trapped in the skin of a woman, while Lenore Hart’s “Lady of the Beasts” has for its title yet another name by which the Great Goddess was known, and for its theme another of her attributes, as a guardian of animals. A more modern myth of Hans Andersen’s surfaces at the end of Claire Blennerhassett’s “Feabhra” (February, the month of Brigid’s feast day), in which an idyllic portrayal of a little girl is undercut by the sinister ending:

your playful feet
dancing in red
t-bar shoes.

Though mythology is at the back of everything, there are several pieces set in the present day, in which the image of Brigid acts to empower a woman – in Caroline Busher’s  prose piece “Brigid and the Heart-Shaped Womb”, not only does water from Brigid’s well help a post-menopausal woman to become pregnant, a sense of Brigid’s determination and agency seems to enable her to discard an unsatisfactory former flame; her feelings go from “there was something about him that she found impossible to resist” to “He was no more than just a face in the crowd”. And in Catherine Anne Cullen’s sharp “Brigid of the Bargain Bins” a modern-day Brigid proves a match for the harsh circumstances of her life:

She checks the prices of sliced pans,
 weighs up own labels against known brands.
She knows they cut corners with prices,
sees through their tricks, has a few of her own.

The third element in the title, “the heritage of Kildare” perhaps features less obviously than the others, but in the prose piece “Strong Bridgets” by Alison Wells, the landscape comes across very clearly:

Decanted suddenly, as a young child, into landscape. Bequeathed an inheritance of bogs, wide skies, rock castles, pools of frog spawn, moss and furze and rushes, holly trees and hideaways. A V-shaped valley between hills, like arms opening out, like a cloak thrown across vastness, marram grass rippling, folding, silk, spreading and settling all round.

This is an anthology of poems, prose pieces and artwork. Though the artwork is scattered throughout, the anthology seems otherwise to have been arranged with mainly poems in the first half, prose in the second. I’m not entirely sure this is the best way of doing it; sometimes after a longish piece of prose one welcomes the different kind of concentration, shorter but more intense, that a poem needs.

Brigid’s blue cloak, reminiscent of how the Virgin Mary is so often portrayed, marks her as, like Mary, an attempt by the adherents of a monotheist religion to make up for the lack of a female deity (ironic, really, that she is no longer officially a saint, having been dropped from the calendar by Pope Paul VI on the ground that there’s no evidence she actually existed).  One does wonder if the Vatican’s real problem with her was that she shared too many attributes, including her name and feast day (Imbolc, February 1st), with a pagan Irish goddess. In this anthology Monica Corish’s “Keepers of the Flame”, an excerpt from a novel, imagines a meeting between the two. There are aspects of her, like her association with metalwork, that are strangely un-nunlike, and one of her miracles, in which she helps an unwillingly pregnant woman by making the embryo “disappear without pain”  (see Maureen Boyle’s “St Brigid in the Orchard”) must have raised some clerical eyebrows.  I don’t suppose her de-listing will have stopped folk celebrating her feast day and legends, in which she “exists” in a different way from that envisaged by Paul VI.