on Erin O’Luanaigh and Alexander Voloshin

Poetry at the Movies

In Erin O’Luanaigh’s Avail, rhyme and prose rub elbows, elegy and illness conspire, golden-age Hollywood films and childhood mortality are allies. O’Luanaigh was diagnosed young with von Willebrand Disease, a bleeding disorder, and her poems explore this time of her life, what becomes of a person in the years after – the values and principles that develop from isolation and anxiety. In a prose piece, ‘My body as a veil’, she writes:

In one of the two photographs taken of me during my illness, it is Christmas morning, and I seem to be made of marshmallow, propped up on a pile of pillows beside the tree. My eyes half-shut, I tug limply at the corner of a wrapped present, too far gone to know I am being photographed.

In the other, I am lingering in the background of a family scene and, in anticipation of the camera, hold up both hands to shield my face.

I came upon these photos in an album several years ago and tore them up.

There is a flatness to the language of this experience, alongside sadness and frustration. O’Luanaigh does not look for definition in her illness, but tears into what illness has made of her. Films and travel are central to her world – forms of escape and fantasy – and in a similar way so are paintings and the museums that house them. ‘In the Morgan Library’, about the now public space in New York City created by J.P. Morgan’s son, teases out the luxury of ...