Rooms hold ‘the shadow / of an old home, another country’ while, in the book’s title poem, a young woman ‘must swallow pain, remain silent. / This is the shape of her life.’ History hounds the writer’s heels and ancient hurts return as she searches for a voice and for forgiveness.
In poems that contain a gamut of emotions What Remains the Same is a distressing book. But through the illumination of dark passages in her own and in our country’s woes Alvy Carragher, in poems touched by something like love, presents a tale of survival and a guiding light.
