The Fever Wards

Synopsis

The title poem of The Fever Wards, which won the Strokestown International Poetry Prize, straddles the border between memory and dream. It evokes the demolition of an old TB hospital where a patient watches the wrecking ball bring the world down around her, reducing it to dust.

Other poems haunt the edges of the land, where the sea can be regenerative, a mangrove swamp, an ominous tropical beach, or a sand-filled school become dreamscapes where the wind ‘blows our words away and drowns them all’ or where a giant wave might come rolling in. Rooney spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in and out of Thailand as a ‘mendicant professor’ to borrow D. J. Enright’s lovely phrase, and the weather of these poems is torrid, feverish, out of synch, like stepping off the high street into the tropical house in a zoo or botanical garden.

The defining politics of the Noughties are refracted in a poem set in Rome where ‘Caesar’s campaign notes are full of shock and awe’ or where Humpty-Dumpty lives ‘in a tower’. The speakers in my poems are new nomads, only partly at home, ranging from country to country but also making forays into history, ‘wandering through the Munich ruins’ or finding Indian bones on Nantucket.

The title poem of The Fever Wards, which won the Strokestown International Poetry Prize, straddles the border between memory and dream. It evokes the demolition of an old TB hospital where a patient watches the wrecking ball bring the world down around her, reduces it to dust.

Other poems haunt the edges of the land, where the sea can be regenerative, a mangrove swamp, an ominous tropical beach, or a sand-filled school become dreamscapes where the wind ‘blows our words away and drowns them all’ or where a giant wave might come rolling in. I spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in and out of Thailand as a ‘mendicant professor’ to borrow D. J. Enright’s lovely phrase, and the weather of these poems is torrid, feverish, out of synch, like stepping off the high street into the tropical house in a zoo or botanical garden.

The defining politics of the Noughties are refracted in a poem set in Rome where ‘Caesar’s campaign notes are full of shock and awe’ or where Humpty-Dumpty lives ‘in a tower’. The speakers in my poems are new nomads, only partly at home, ranging from country to country but also making forays into history, ‘wandering through the Munich ruins’ or finding Indian bones on Nantucket.

I wanted to seduce my readers into off-kilter, exotic terrain, the way a tout might, or a con-artist, or a down-at-heel charmer, the better to clobber them with language. I wanted the poems to be lush and dripping, like primary jungle in the rainy season. The reader is invited to trek through them and admire the foliage along the way and the monkeys swinging through the trees.

Reviews of this Book

‘Lushly decadent yet simply poetic ... it reminds one of a rare orchid – beautiful, unnatural and poisonous.’ —The Sunday Press