Poet and novelist Eoghan Walls was born in Derry and educated in Wales and Ireland. He has lived in Germany and Rwanda and now teaches creative writing at Lancaster University. He is the author of two previous collections of poetry with Seren Books and two novels with Seren Stories Press. He won an Eric Gregory award in 2006. 

Elsa and the Wolfman takes the form of a lyrical duet between a father and his newborn daughter. The child poems are composed in words that are playful, questioning and curious and are written in contrast to the more conventionally laid out classical forms of the voice of the father.

The half-page gaps between title and text in the case of the former is perhaps suggestive of the daughter needing space to summon up her responses to the world she sees about her. These child poems, in the words of the author, “fall disobedient and wild across the page” and are not the only words of his newest daughter. In a guest post conducted with Seren, Walls says “the poems are of course a braid of experiences that include my elder daughters, my own childhood and my experience of being an animal in the world”.  Together, father and daughter navigate a world beset by pandemics, dinosaurs, kidney stones and other childhood nightmares.

The cover artwork, Little Red Riding Hood by F Philipp, taken from the Jack Zipes Historic Fairy Tale Postcard Collection / Minneapolis College of Art and Design, is the perfect introduction to ‘Wolfman’ – an imagined character, half animal / half man, who prowls through the book at regular intervals. He is the father who takes on the role of the villain in his games with his daughter. He appears as ‘wolf’ to begin with but then turns into ‘wolfman’. In these delightful scenes things rarely end well for him. In the very first poem, ‘The Wolf and the Seven Goats’, his destiny has already been carved out for him:

 

     One day, he’ll learn to sleep

     on his own in a nearby field,

 

     deep enough for us to slice

     his guts open with a shovel

 

     and suture granite blocks

     in his intestines. If he falls,

 

     gut-dragged into the well,

     he will not rise from sleep,

 

     as his new stone children

     sip water from his seams.

 

His insatiable hunger to fill his belly is brought to the fore in ‘Little Red’ where every couplet ends with the word ‘inside’. The opening line, “There is no rose redder than the wolf’s throat inside” poses a threat to the girl in the last line who is “walking in the woods, looking to go inside”.

Dinosaurs also rove through these poems. In ‘The Ankylosaur’, a type of plant-eating dinosaur, Walls successfully blends the prehistoric with the present with an overlay of the Covid pandemic. Lockdown is the central focus of ‘The Certainty of Perpetual Life as Witnessed in Birdsong’ where, once more, links are made with the prehistoric world, with dinosaurs being viewed as the forefathers of birds.

Norse mythology is referenced in ‘Watching a Girl on the Grass’ where the father echoing “Frigg in uneasy metaphors” guards his daughter’s progress on the grass “scanning for blades of glass, for bees in the hooded flowers, / drinks for spikes, bags for knives, years between the hours …” until such time as she cleaves to another for protection.

Walls uses all his powers of invention to enter the world of childhood and see things from his daughter’s perspective where “seeing is mostly distant ... like at bus windows” and dreams and nightmares fuse with fairy tales to startle and delight. Elsa’s world is also defined by nursery rhymes: ‘The Wheels of Her Song’  is a delightful play on ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, an American folksong written by Verna Hills. Walls sets his poem appropriately on a bus which is “taking the back road” to a crèche. Elsa gets the words wrong but this does not matter: “what she does is her, as a rose is a rose.”

There may be shadow, as in ‘Dark Matter’,  ‘White Cliffs’ and ‘The Star Factory’ but there is also light and “all big laughter”. ‘The Wolfman’s Warning’ brings out everything that is beautiful about a father’s protectiveness of his daughter. Humour is to be found in ‘Half-Culchies’ where, despite all their wild imaginings, “most of what occurs is sheep on the back road". ‘Elsa on Apple Trees’ describes his daughter’s fearful imaginings about what will happen to her after she has swallowed an apple seed, as she worries about whether or not it will germinate inside her. It is one of my favourite poems in the book, together with ‘The Wolfman on the Orchard’:

 

     Each year I try to write of snow in the apple blossoms.

     How harvests fail if it falls past zero in the apple blossoms.

 

     Of sirens. Farmers stumbling over children after midnight,

     moonlit sprinklers casting icy coats on the apple blossoms.

 

     Of buds surviving suspended at freezing point in cocoons.

     Sunrise in a thousand million globes in the apple blossoms.

 

This is a collection to be cherished. It is a wonderful blend of fantasy and reality, timeless in its reach, which speaks to us of the playful interactions between a father and his daughter and the bond that is created between them.

 

 Eoghan Walls, Elsa and the Wolfman, Seren, £10.99