Tetris Elegy

On Gail McConnell's The Sun is Open

As with your shadow I with these did play

(Shakespeare, Sonnet 98)

It’s surprising to realise that Gail McConnell’s The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021) is a poetic sequence profoundly concerned with play. The book’s central subject — the shooting of the poet’s father by the IRA outside their family home when she was three years old — is not playful. And the lifelong mourning process it traces makes it a form of extended elegy.

But elegy also wants to play. When Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’ commands her dead son to ‘quit / Playing dead at all, by now it’s well beyond / A joke’, the hope is that make-believe might become a game of hide-and-seek that can still be won. When Mimi Khalvati’s poem in memory of her mother, ‘Ghazal: In Silence’, ends by dropping a single word down a well, it turns elegiac language into a wishful, ritual toy.

In If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019), the book-length elegy by McConnell’s colleague at Queen’s University Belfast, Stephen Sexton, there is one main mode of play which serves as the platform for poetic consolation: Super Mario. But The Sun is Open fidgets between many, distracted in its displacement of loss: programming a game on an early ‘BBC’ schools computer (‘you typed in rows / and rows of code it made no / sense’); holding a tea party in a play tent (‘an airy square a cube of plastic / poles’); indulging in light recreational pyromania (‘we burned the / matches in the box then burned / the box the matches came in’).

What all these activities have in common is the curiosity about how the world works, and the discovery of its forms. And making and breaking boxes is the method of the poem itself, as explained in the opening pages:

The material being treated in this way is a personal archive known as the ‘DAD BOX’ (‘you assemble it yourself it / came flat pack a square’), containing newspaper clippings about William McConnell as well as some books and papers (Bibles, a diary, school magazines, personal writings).

The poem mingles these texts with its own words: the memorabilia of a child who doesn’t remember, shaped by an adult trying to understand their connection. As Jack Underwood recently observed in his acutely self-puzzling memoir on poetry, parenthood and uncertainty, Not Even This (Corsair, 2021), a small child’s need to arrange many small, treasured objects around her every day offers a literal analogy for the lyric impulse: they are ‘your poem about you’.

The line breaks created by running unpunctuated text into strictly justified columns represent a doubting mind breaking words uncertainly. Occasional relief is found in the temporary confidence of regular metre, as when the poet tunes the father’s guitar with iambic joy: ‘ I touch / each one & turn the key / until the sound I hope / is close’.

The sequence’s visual neatness becomes increasingly fractured as the grown-up poet confronts conflicting versions of the same man: the playful parent who was also assistant governor of the Maze prison, accused of organising beatings of political prisoners. Here, the ‘H’ shape of the building’s floorplan enters the various distressed visual disruptions to the book’s comfortingly solid central form.

Play, though, can also be political, as in McConnell’s quiet punning on the symbolism of the Ulster Protestant allegiance to William of Orange. Her earlier pamphlet, Fothermather (Ink Sweat and Tears, 2019), opened with a prose poem, ‘Orange’, on the excitement of a queer couple planning for a child in Northern Ireland, where there is no NHS fertility treatment for same-sex couples: ‘There must be many ways to peel an orange. I by orange I mean Tangerine. Or Clementine.’ In The Sun is Open, orange returns both as the warm colour of the cover, and as the word hidden in a poem about the annual celebration of ‘the Twelfth’ — or Orange Order parade: ‘so many men their bodies / stuffed inside their clothes I / made each row disappear all / those shapes I put in place the / buttons of my Game Boy sticky / with orangeade’.

At the end of ‘Lycidas’, Milton’s ‘uncouth swain’ is said to have ‘touch’d the stops of various tender quills’ in playing out his pastoral elegy. In The Sun is Open, it is the child thumbing away the cascading blocks of Tetris who brings a new poetic order to the world after violent loss. The last sentence of the book is the dedication to the poet’s three-year-old son: ‘for teaching me what language is and what it makes’.

[Gail McConnell’s earlier poem on the same subject, ‘Type Face’, was published in the online magazine Blackbox Manifold: read it here.]