figures of stone

Northwords Now Issue No.15, Summer 2010

Reviewed by Greg Malley

Gerard Rochford’s pamphlet Figures of Stone is aptly titled. Not only are several of the poems about actual stones of various kinds but he’s also interested in the figurative
and symbolic resonances of stones and,in particular, the congruence between poetry
and stone, between language and silence, and how both poems and stones serve as memorials.

Indeed, the sensitive and very practical task of choosing a headstone forms the subject matter of The Split:

'We set it at your grave, beside a circle of stones
It waits there for your name and for your dates.'

Elsewhere it is the ambiguity of stones, as metaphor and as material, which draws Rochford’s meditative gaze. In Gaelic Psalms the rock of the church can oppress as well support, while the digging of a grave in Funeral at Tigh-na-dig involves a kind of violence to the earth where the boulders ‘lie…scattered/like bones and skulls of war.’

There are also, it should be said, some altogether breezier poems to lighten the load of this collection but, in the end, it’s Rochford’s clear-sighted focus on the earth as a place for dying as well as living that stays in the memory.