ANNE-MARIE FYFE IS A POET AND A WRITER CONCERNED WITH PRESENCES AND ABSENCES. The trajectory of her collected oeuvre to date shows that her own highly distinctive poetic language and discourse carves itself out of the emotional and psychological vacancies that paradoxically occupy physical spaces that appear abandoned and forlorn.  House of Small Absences is her fifth book to date: some fifty or so poems spanning a variety of locations, and touched by the lingering presence of the past, are arbitrarily siphoned off into four sections.   At its heart, the book purveys a striking sense of the familiar and the alien and how they simultaneously co-exist and transmute into each other in the blinking of an eye.  A poet who has exchanged the sylvan tranquillity of the Glens of Antrim for the concrete and high rise world of London, Fyfe’s work shows an intimate familiarity with a wide variety of geographical milieux and an enviable ability to create a sense of place that is virtually self-constructed by the process of reading itself.  Within the confines of the volume, readers find themselves transported from the streets of Manhattan to the foothills of the Romanian Carpathians:  scenes range from “an orphaned snowy owl [who’s] lost his night sensors’ (‘Carpathian Flyer’) to the ‘Lancia swerving closer than you’d like’ (Camino Real) to ‘apartments for rent in upper floors, unclaimed, tenantless,/their marble door-plaques as yet unlettered’(‘Lower Manhattan’)
            The latter best sums up the glaring paradox that fuels this collection:  that of the physical space occupied by human beings that now finds itself abandoned and alone.  The collection is driven by the imperative need to recreate, or at least, to re-imagine the kinds of lives led by the invisible individuals that haunt the pages and the imagination. For Fyfe, it is this idea of vacancy and its contingent atmosphere which becomes essential to the (re)creation of lives either lived to their fullest or constrained by circumstances.  The eponymous poem of the collection cites Emily Dickinson and reveals with incremental build up towards shock the harsh reality of existence for inmates in a psychiatric hospital:
In her room at the eaves of the world/She’s stuck again on the perplexity of fly papers.
            The poem is fixated with the idea of fixation and obsession, with an unresolved sense of conflict between keeping memories alive and learning to let go of the past. One might be a touch fanciful and say that Fyfe is playing with being obsessed by obsession itself and fully in awe of its power to hold onto individuals in spite of their potential for damage.
            Nor is Fyfe afraid to shun the domestic and the familiar for more arcane discourses. She reveals a refreshing ability to engage with the language of scientific experimentation and discovery, finding in it a way of discussing profoundly distressing personal experience. In ‘Splitting the Atom’, the imagery of dark matter and atomic fission becomes a conduit for the exploration of a mother’s descent into the depths of depression:
Blackness that had defeated her/A corridored room. Manicured grounds.
Yet within the apparent darkness of confinement within a mental institution, there is a moment of unexpected and surprisingly joyous revelation:
Striking out/on orbits, tangents, rewound neurons/irretrievably forced landings/on solitary uncharted dark stars.
            Whereas mental illness incarcerates the physical body within a supervised space, it also has the power to liberate the imagination and to forge new ways of seeing. At their most profound, the poems invoke a sense of the random and the arbitrary, and the powerlessness of human beings in the face of unknown and immutable higher powers and this spiritual awareness is perhaps the most surprising aspect of this collection.
At its heart, this collection interrogates the concept of home and whilst acknowledging its role as a bedrock of identity and security, seems to leave the reader purposefully uneasy about its meaning and validity in an age of globalisation and dislocation, a reality that Fyfe tacitly and painfully acknowledges throughout the collection. To her credit, Fyfe resists the temptation to make ‘home’ a secure and settled notion, rather she earnestly acknowledges that the twenty-first century has imposed a transitory nomadism on individuals whose lives are constantly shaped and re-shaped by ever changing circumstances and locations.  Her knack is for pointedly reminding the reader of the key and salient reality that Home in the hypermobile and hyperconnected twenty-first century has become an ever more unstable and uncertain concept. The fiction of home is a cherished one, but one that Fyfe accepts is a fallible one whose comfort is at best skin deep.
For all its preoccupation with the familiar and the domestic, this is a collection that is not afraid to venture into a diverse of territories and physical spaces:  within a few pages the reader travels from the Carpathians of Romania to the streets of Lower Manhattan.   Fyfe’s sharp eye for observation is that of the outsider’s: she sees these places with a new insight and a profound acknowledgement of the complex interactions between human beings and their physical environment, whether it be rural or urban.  If there is perhaps one criticism that one could level at this collection, it could be that the division into four sections seems to add no sense of added meaning, especially in a book that calls the reader to accept the reality of random dislocation and isolation. However, that is really more to do with the arrangement of the poems rather than their content and does not detract from their aesthetic achievement and vivid image. The experience of living in these poems and reading them is a simultaneously comforting and unsettling experience, and one that most certainly lingers in the reader’s mind.