Across the poems gathered in Crossings, a small set of images recurs: water that cannot be reached, hands that speak where words fail, light crossing into darkness or darkness into light, and the sacraments and feast days of Irish Catholicism used as a vocabulary for grief. Read as a body of work, the poems can be seen as variations on an inherited grammar of family, faith, and loss. Read alongside poets Mulhern has cited or studied, they also show affinities with a particular lineage rather than emerging only from temperament.
I. Water as Inheritance and Deprivation
Water appears throughout the collection not as comfort but as a measure of distance. The poem “Water” renders a dying man almost entirely through withheld liquid: “blue-water eyes,” “broken capillaries / like tributaries on arid land,” ending on “hands cupped bending. / Water he cannot reach.” “Catherine” complicates the image by tying it to labor and memory at once: a grandmother’s recollection of swimming “through dark water to reach a boulder crashed by foam” to gather sea lettuce, “scrape the rocks and then make stew,” even as her present body is lowered into a warm domestic bath. “Scrape the Rocks” returns to the same Clew Bay boulder and the same grandmother, now lowered into “Clew Bay in an old white tub” — the girl who once swam for sea lettuce and the old woman bathed by her family are the same body, forty years apart, held in the same water. “Triggers” grounds the element in unglamorous work, a grandmother who “hugged a wooden pail, stepped onto earth, / and trekked to the water” without complaint. In each case, water is inherited alongside hardship; it is rarely simply given, and the collection never lets the reader forget what it cost to fetch it.
II. Hands as the Site of Unspoken Love
Where speech in these poems tends toward reticence, touch is permitted to say what dialogue will not. “The Crosswalk” fixes an entire father-son relationship in a single recalled gesture, a tie knotted, hands positioned, and then, years later, a funeral photograph: “Your hands on mine. / Proof that we had closeness for a moment.” “Moving Forward” universalizes the gesture into an ethic: “touch a hand to show we care, / massage a pained foot, / … / All are acts that make us whole again.” “Honeymoon” and “Shoes” extend the same vocabulary to the feet — ointment worked into a heel, a grandmother’s toes eased into shoes too small, the crooked toes of a woman named Helen who carried “shoes passed house to house” her whole life. The hand, across the collection, is trusted the way statement is not.
III. Thresholds of Light and Dark
A third recurring trope marks passage itself — the literal and figurative crossing that gives the collection its title. “Dark City” stages a grandfather’s emigration from Ireland as a threshold scene, moving from a two-year-old’s single memory of the man in a “dark hallway” to an adult speaker standing at his abandoned homestead, pressing “my palm against the homestead wall, / as you touched my head so many years ago” — the touched head becoming the touching hand, recurrence rendered as physical rhyme rather than statement, before the poem resolves: “I see you move from darkness into the light and beyond.” “Brother Mike” compresses the same crossing into a wordless gesture of faith glimpsed “in dashboard light.” “The Guard” locates a related light inside a church’s stained glass, “red, gold, and green illuminations,” presiding over a scene of doubt rather than certainty. Light in these poems does not resolve; it marks the place where a crossing is underway — a preoccupation the poems share with Yeats, whose own thresholds, lakes, and birds mark the same pull between this world and what Mulhern’s fiction calls simply “the other room.”
IV. A Personal Liturgy
The collection draws its structural vocabulary from Irish Catholic practice — crossing oneself, communion, feast days, prayer — but rarely uses that vocabulary to deliver doctrine. “Brother Mike” ends on an act of private communion offered instead of advice; “Leaves” pairs a recited prayer at a graveside with the plain admission “We’re done,” repeated later as memory rather than instruction, its last lines rejoining the father’s breath to the speaker’s own: “Yours joins with mine. / I cannot see you gone.” This is not confined to Crossings; the same handful of formulae recur across Mulhern’s five books with enough consistency to function as an actual liturgy rather than a metaphorical one — the Feast of the Assumption, the seawater cure at Nantasket, a wet silvery scalp and a crown the boy will not touch, a mourning dove rising and descending over water, “Up you go. On the count of three,” a halo-shaped pool of blood, the borrowed Thoreau line “Goodness is the only investment that never fails,” and the flat verdict “a useless thing” — a small set of formulae returned to on a cycle, the way a missal returns to the same propers every August 15th. Mulhern has said as much himself, in the poems, in one line that functions as a statement of genre rather than a figure of speech: “My family members are my poems. / My poems are my prayers.”
V. The Poetic Lineage
The poems draw on a recognizable lineage. An Imagist preference for concrete objects recalls Pound’s image and Williams’s conviction that there are “no ideas but in things.” The folded robe, the gold-trimmed teapot, and the burlap bag of shoes carry emotions the poems do not state outright; “Water,” with its old man “reaching for water / that will not rise,” works in a similarly image-centered mode. The Irish memory-poems about ancestral labor share an interest with Seamus Heaney’s work in a working forebear’s hands and tools as ways of understanding oneself. Yeats’s poems offer another reference point for thresholds, lakes, and birds pulling between two worlds. Mary Oliver’s devotional attention to the natural world helps illuminate the robins’ nest of “The Nest” and the trilling birds of “She Knelt.” The plainspoken American domestic elegy of Jane Kenyon and Ted Kooser — quiet, unshowy, set in kitchens and sickrooms and cars, alert to ordinary objects — is a register the collection often approaches. And Emily Dickinson’s dash, deferred turn, and refusal to over-explain offer one context for Mulhern’s phrase “the permission to end on a hyphen,” a permission the poems sometimes take up directly.
These influences meet a plainspoken, working-class Boston-Irish diction (“copacetic,” “malarkey,” “mad as a box of frogs”); attention to a shined shoe, a cut heel dressed with ointment, or a cross traced on a forehead in dashboard light; and a tendency toward understatement, often allowing a final image to carry emotion. The recurring belief that the dead are “in the other room” also shifts these elegies toward ongoing presence as well as loss.
VI. The Elegy That Refuses to Close
A recurring move in the collection is the elegy that reaches the edge of final loss and then, in its last lines, reopens the door — not through doctrine, but through a recovered image, a retained voice, or a present-tense return. “Leaves” states “You’re no longer here. / I stand and leave,” and yet the whisper “We’re done” has just been heard. “Copacetic” withholds its grief until the closing image of the robe “folded, / on the table by the door.” “Carol” lets its subject become “just part of the current / carrying you safely home.” Rather than argue their way to comfort, these poems leave the loss open to continued memory and presence.
VII. Poetry Against Prose: A Note on Craft
Set beside Mulhern’s short fiction, particularly “Assumptions,” the poems show what changes when related materials are compressed into verse. A story can let a relationship unfold across scenes and years — a dog rehomed, a beach pilgrimage, a decline witnessed in stages. A poem may locate a comparable weight in a single stanza or image, leaving the reader to supply the surrounding years. The relationship can run in both directions: “Copacetic” — the father in the doorway, the untouched Jell-O, the folded robe — anticipates elements later developed in “The Wrong Way” and in the father’s death in Give Them Unquiet Dreams. “Scrape the Rocks” relates closely to bath scenes in “A Bath” and “Blindfolded.” “Shoes” and “She Knelt” provide parts of an immigrant backstory that recurs across the books. “Moving Forward” includes the blind mother whose “fingers trace my face,” a gesture that also recurs in the fiction. The poems often isolate recurring images — an object, memory, or threshold — that the fiction later places in scenes and relationships.
Taken together, these recurring materials — reached-for water, speaking hands, thresholds of light, a personal liturgy, a chosen lineage, and an elegy that will not fully close — describe a single imaginative territory that the poems return to from different angles, poem after poem, the way memory itself returns to the same handful of scenes without ever quite exhausting them. A fuller treatment of this method, and of the poems’ place in Mulhern’s wider body of work, appears in the critical study The Writing Style of James Mulhern (Silver Current Press).