In Gail McConnell’s first collection The Sun is Open, what is not said, or seen, is as powerful as what is. Creating a complex portrait of the Belfast of her childhood, McConnell interrogates the construction of consciousness, and the authorities which shape perception, in a world darkened by the violence woven both from, and into it. This growth of a poet’s mind, seen first through the eyes of the child, allows for the moving and sometimes comedic depiction of a world taken at face value, while increasingly challenging the surfaces of language. Attempts to understand both her place, and a father’s murder, from the traces that are left - how ‘my Father remains in me’ - culminate in complex adult deconstructions and redactions of language, in which signifiers themselves become tools to shape and redeem the narrative, another kind of meditation on the way ‘the sounds she heard / became her own’.

The past has a long reach in this volume, rooted and repeating in a kind of cultural trance that is as personal as it is historic. Archetypal biblical narratives of suffering, Jonah, and Ruth, take their place alongside the lunchtime news, ‘another / crash a bomb scare one / suspended sentence’, where each news story normalises the thousands that have gone before. There is the perfunctory violence of men who watch ‘to find out if they had / killed their target’ while eating fish and chips, and the casual violence of cartoons, where ‘Doctor Gloom whacks him / with a mallet BONK […] points the gun’. Nightmarish dystopian dreams appear out of their own hidden realm, and complex motivations are depersonalised in the poem ‘a bullet is compelled to spin’, which, adopting an instructional tone, removes all context to chilling effect. And what can be said about the violations by church and state, when children too, in their unsupervised moments, reveal themselves to be small arsonists compelled to annihilate everything: ‘we burned the / matches in the box then burned / the box the matches came in’, McConnell’s amplifications dramatizing a compulsion as ancient as Prometheus?

With subtlety, however, the poet shows how each moment is formed from, and creates, a thousand threads, the echoes ‘vibrating still’, and embodies these in poems whose euphemisms perform helpful acts of naming - ‘The Tremblies we call it when my / body shakes’ - but have limited impact, ‘can’t make it stop / except by sleep’. The simple measures of a child’s world, for example, ‘Honey / a lab as old as me’, are displaced by an instinctive response to a world already humming with danger, the child ‘whose dad we / knew not to say was in the police’, or the disruptions of what ‘dislodges in my body / when I hear balloons pop pop’. But ambiguities remain - how to differentiate these traumas from the apparently charismatic experience, when ‘the Spirit bends my knees / I hit the floor’ and ‘holy holy sings / the choir’, leaving the speaker equally outside her own experience?

The language and authority of religion pulls under these poems, causal, disruptive, surfacing in its different shapes, but the back drop to the world of play is also British rule. ‘I know the answer, it’s Margaret Thatcher’ achieves comedic effect, but fulfils its darker reverberation in both the helicopter that hovers, as natural to the child as the ‘birdsong’ of the same line, and the subterranean reach of history in the aunts’ celebration of the Twelfth, with its deck chairs and Protestant holiday mood. The shape and shaping of the child’s world is mapped out for us in a Belfast which appears in its church halls and school rooms, the privacy of the spare room where the DAD BOX is unpacked, and finally the Long Kesh prison itself, that ‘brutality of architecture’, whose ominous shape is another appropriation of language. McConnell shows how even that notoriety can be transformed in another trick of language, as the prison becomes a corporate commodity like the Famine Village or model safe house – ‘the stuff of thrillers’, whitewashing all the personal anguish and political complexity these stories conceal.

It is ultimately language, that other fire, which has the last word. There is a deep pleasure taken by McConnell in words and sounds themselves, the ways of making them: typeface, keyboard, spaghetti shapes on the plate, the phonetic articulation and discovery of names, ‘the name you / gave me’ and their dimensions, ‘between one and two / syllables geeeaaaal you called me’. Naming becomes both legacy and compass, and an enquiry about another kind of origin: ‘how did we spin the thread / that tethered each to each?’ McConnell’s meditation on the word ‘safe’ is prismatic, splitting the single word into a multitude of meanings which compete with each other to accumulate ironies. Language turns on its own edge to reveal new surfaces, split a hair, reverse our expectation. Shifting shape in the shift of a letter, the literal ‘save as’, indeterminate, shifts effortlessly to ‘safe house’. There is what we save and might be saved by, relics, remnants, ‘The Good News’, ‘New Horizons’, the DAD BOX. There is ‘the Children’s Special Searchlight Mission’, where redemptive biblical narratives are re-enacted on the beach.

But McConnell also maps disorientations. The speaker attempts to ‘make piles’ then forgets ‘what it / was I was looking for’, and the placing of poems is as much part of their form as their individual lineation, creating disturbances and disruptions of meaning. Filled with words and items adrift from their contexts, the DAD BOX proves a repository that eludes reconstruction. McConnell has only remnants, her father’s own words and the witness of others: the celebratory eulogy and his part in an unredeemed political violence.

The remedy? In one of many echoes, McConnell offers the literary resonance of Iago’s words, ‘what wound did ever heal but by degrees’, but introduces a characteristic complication - are we to hear a subversive note from that master of violation, or take these words out of their context, and appropriate the consolation offered by the words themselves? The infinite and creative possibilities of signifiers and their signification is a force to be reckoned with: ‘I have’, says the speaker, ‘made my own psalm’. The reverberating silences of redacted psalms and statements of witness subvert and release new meanings, poetic, sparse. Psalm 23, reconfigured, reveals the explosive turn, where ‘my enemies see me and know my house’.

McConnell’s sequence does not centre itself in overt political or religious debate, but makes its own solar return in acts of poetic revision both direct and oblique. Her command of voice is flawless. Through the eyes of a child whose sensibility is alert to the body of things, we can follow an inevitable and touching logic - ‘night and day he made and peas’, but find too that there are things that must be taken on faith: ‘the way we’re moving round the sun we say sunset but / it’s wrong we learnt in school’. And it is we ‘that tilt’, orbiting that ubiquitous star, ‘not the sun that sets’, finding it at times benevolent, at others absent – a kind of eye or window that opens and closes.