The songs I sing are sisters by Cáit o’Neill McCulloch and Sinéad McClure

A Review by Anne MacLeod

The songs I sing are sisters
Cáit o’Neill McCulloch and Sinéad McClure
Dreich (2022) £6.00

The first print run of this chapbook sold out in days. This should not surprise. It is more astonishing that the newly emergent poets whose voices combine in these songs of separation and homecoming should have reached the 2020’s before committing verse to paper.

Cáit O’Neill McCulloch is, of course, well-known in the Highlands as community archaeologist, ethnologist and museum curator and Sinéad McCulloch in Eire as children’s writer and radio producer –neither one a stranger to the written word – but it was the pandemic, with its online opportunities for technological face to face communication and the ensuing flourishing of online poetry readings and workshops, that brought them together.

And thank goodness it did. The work in this collaborative chapbook which won the Dreich 2022 Classic Chapbook Competition is uplifting and lyrical, questing and questioning; every poem fully-formed. The poets address the emigrant’s dilemma, ‘My mother named distance a street of goodbyes’ ( S: Homecoming). ‘Tell us... how when the houses were burned they were saved/ the doors’ (C: Thresholds.) They explore the richnesses of family relationships amplified and stressed by the otherness of the migrant, the careful hoarding of culture. ‘My mother collected stones, they lined her window sill/ all shapes and dialects’. (S: We were stones.) ‘This is how the poetry of my family happened/ spoken, imagined, answered and unanswered’ (C. Litanies.). They do not forget the fathers, who shine too. ‘my father/ all light.’ ( C. Mo Sholas.). ‘.. Like stars in the dark.’ (S. An apparition of my father.)

The collection is beautifully constructed, reads with a sense of unity enhanced by the lack of individually named authorship. (The index at the back does list each poet’s work.) And the voices, though distinct and individual, ring together as if in song. Blood harmony.

Forty pages, dazzled with sea and hope and time, offering us all a way to survive together, to become ‘.. your song .. spiralled into stone.. in the carry of your life-stream’ (C. Kin.). I commend them to you.