Across the poems gathered in Crossings, a small set of images recurs with enough insistence to function as a private liturgy: 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 repurposed as the only vocabulary large enough for grief. Read as a body of work, the poems are less a collection of separate lyrics than variations on a single inherited grammar of family, faith, and loss.
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. “Triggers” grounds the same 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.
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 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: “What were you thinking as you exited this door? […] 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.
IV. Religious Vocabulary Repurposed for Grief
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. The effect throughout is of a family that has kept the forms of belief — the gestures, the feast days, the crossing of oneself — while directing them toward memory and mutual care as much as toward doctrine.
V. Poetry Against Prose: A Note on Craft
Set beside Mulhern’s short fiction, particularly “Assumptions,” the poems reveal what changes when the same materials are compressed into verse. The story can let a relationship unfold across scenes and years — a dog rehomed, a beach pilgrimage, a decline witnessed in stages. The poem must locate an equivalent weight inside a single stanza or image, trusting the reader to supply the surrounding years. Both forms share the same reticence and the same devotion to the physical object — a hand, a teapot, a wooden pail — but the story has room to earn its feeling through accumulation, while the poem must produce that feeling by compression, in the space of a page or less.
Taken together, these recurring materials — reached-for water, speaking hands, thresholds of light, and inherited religious form — 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.