Memories Are Sanity

By Julia Cirignano

Thank you to the author for gifting me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. 

Oisin Breen’s debut collection of poetry, Flowers, All Sorts in Blossom, Figs, Berries, and Fruits Forgotten, is set to be published later this March. Throughout this 95-page collection, Irish poet Oisin Breen explores a series of memories, focusing on the importance of remembering and cherishing. Each memory asks questions; deconstructing why he did the things he did.

I’m not sure if it was the difference of language or if some parts were too abstract, but there were certain sections that I couldn’t full grasp. While some sections felt this way, Breen’s more simplistic lines are his strongest and most memorable,

“And I place flowers on my father’s grave,

a gesture, like any other,


to bring life to the dead.”

Memories are clearly important to Breen. He even goes as far as to measure his worth to other people based of their memories of him. We see this when he talks about his father’s lack of awareness and cognitive reasoning due to his addition to alcohol,

“I start, not with a heavenly chorus, a wail, or a Guinness wet lip against

my cheek as my da tells me he loves me — a moment he will always

forget, yet one that defines me — but precedes and succeeds the seconds

that counted for him when he said there he is, that’s my boy.”

Breen uses memory, remembering, and repetition to comfort himself. He also uses memories and stories as a gateway and a context in which he can explore concepts related to identity, reality and religion,

“I remember, and I was smiling at the likeness between discovery and

laughter; history and (re)imagining; those methodologies of soulfulness;

and the way I, myself, blush epiphanies in full glasses.”

At the beginning of this collection, Breen is very focused on holding the past close to him, yet as the book progresses, he learns to let these things go. In the third section, Her Cross Carried, Burnt, Breen explores ideas of growth, therefore learning to be comfortable with the unknown,

“Of the other then,


Know that from here-on-in we are their unknowable,

And they our unknown.

 

Of ourselves then,


Know that we make in ourselves reality,

And in tumult always breathe.”

Enjoy some of my favorite quotes from, Flowers, All Sorts in Blossom, Figs, Berries, and Fruits Forgotten,

“This is a quilt-work composed of acts of forgetting,”

 

“My clothes hang heavy with the flavour of wet fire,”


 

“I had placed a last act of submission above one of love.”

 

“This is how we will escape the logic of failed intimacy.”

 

“This is the pursuit of tension and equilibrium, as life begets life

as it always does. “

 

“And I say we should play kissing games,


But she’d like the real heaviness so much more.”

 

“Gutted, the only constancy I have is my fear.

It is my own. My own. My own.”

 

“we drink

vermouth on benches, waiting for our sorrow to mean something, as it

surely must and did when we aged.”

 

“though this here was never constructed, there was no need

for it to be, for in place of reality, you and I, we have built my

conveyances everywhere,”

 

“So then it is that while you undress me,


you undress just another version of yourself.

So then it is that while I lick your thighs,

I send shivers down my spine.”