Visitors to the Natural History Museum in London enter its Victorian hall under the long ribbed shadow of the skeleton of a blue whale. Foundered on a sand bank off the coast of Wexford in March 1891, its remains made their way to the imperial metropolis, where they now float in weightless air, the parched curve of the spine a bony narrative of colony, trade and extraction.
Alice Kinsella and Daniel Wade’s Wake of the Whale immerses its readers in the disorienting aftermath of that world moment of oceanic turbulence, the spindrift of which is the rust-flecked remains of the whaling companies that haunted Ireland’s northwest shores at the turn of the 19th century. The anatomy of these neglected places leads Kinsella and Wade to explore what their own lives mean in relation to the sea life around them. In their maritime vision, Blacksod Bay is the intersection through which the personal and the planetary pass, the artist a watcher at the edge, looking for a fin break on the horizon. The signs they see are blurred by a history of human prejudice and a changing global weather. So they explore the dimensions of a whale’s sentience, of its secret life offshore, its utility, its value and its survival.
Whales have a strange power as symbols of our displacement from the world. Kinsella and Wade shape such alienation into a collage patched from past and present, the social history of the late whaling station on Inishkea anticipating the contested construction of the Corrib gas terminal. For all that theirs is a study of what it means to absorb the idea of empathy across species into the fabric of one’s own life, the book’s particular moments of felt attention are its most powerful, the worries over work, money and time off, the worn raincoat and the old phone all signs of the harsh weathering that deep feeling once awakened must endure.
Out of this, the episodic narrative speaks in poems and prose that lay the startled heart open. Wake of the Whale is a strangely beautiful book, a ghost body to the skeletons we keep, immersed in a dream world of Mayo that is its own awakening. Tender, direct and courageous, it is an ocean song in strange tongues, siren, seaward, salt-worn.
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Nicholas Allen is the director of the University of Georgia’s Willson Center and the Baldwin Professor in the Humanities. His latest book is Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled (Oxford University Press)
