Angel Blood: The Tess Poems

by Kevin Irie

Angel Blood: The Tess Poems is Kevin Irie’s radical re-interpretation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Here, Tess herself recounts her tale of sex, class, money, and violence. This is the voice not of a Victorian maiden but a demonic Tess returned from the dead, unleashed from the underworld. Finally free to speak as she pleases, and with nothing to lose, she does not care who will be taken aback, be it husband, family, or “The President of the Immortals” – or even the innocent reader.

Awards/Award Nominations

Long-listed for the 2005 ReLit Awards

Reviews

Adopting the posthumous voice of a wronged girl from 19th-century fiction makes for a bold imaginative leap on Irie’s part. Yet he enters into Tess’s situation so thoughtfully, and his diction is so exact, that he ends up making a success of it. ~Harry Vandervlist, Alberta Views

Angel Blood is a clever palimpsest that re-positions the dramatic monologue and Tess’s intimate thoughts squarely in our time and place. ...In the end, her character emerges as complex, clever, manipulative, decidedly in-control; we sympathize with her plight but cheer on her feminine wiles. Kevin Irie’s narrative gifts and use of dramatic, verbal, and situational irony are an endless source of delight. Readers will want to return to the salacious gossip and pick up on the metafictional gloss on point of view and narrative strategy – its duplicitous, devious meanderings – at the same time. ~Richard Stevenson, Lethbridge Insider

The narrative is interesting on a number of levels: because it is written in Tess’s voice, because it is reflective (we hear from Tess as a spirit), because it is a commentary on the way women were treated at the time of Hardy’s novel and because this is a male poet writing from a woman’s perspective. Irie succeeds in creating a strong narrative and his lines seduce readers into Tess’s world. ~Jocelyn Grosse, Fast Forward

This isn’t a Victorian angel of the hearth, but a flesh and blood heroine. It has been suggested that “Tess” is a fictional figure drawn from the heroines of works by Fielding, Disraeli, Thackery, Gaskell and Eliot. Well, counterposed with Sylvia Plath, Medbh McGuckian, Elizabeth Bishop, Eira Stenberg, Anne Carson, Moniza Alvi, John Sutherland, Susan Musgrave and Anne Sexton, by Irie, virtually anything is possible. Another Tess is heartbreakingly probable. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal

Tapping into the emotions of willful Tess Durbeyfield of Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Kevin Irie gestures to the reader to overhear her intimate thoughts, and there are heart-quickening moments aplenty: “I felt my childhood leave without me,” “He would be what I earn for my living,” “Where do you find the mercy to grieve for yourself?” “A woman gone missing from her own life.” I could continue in this vein, but it is better for the reader to discover such intimacies in this book of poems about a literary character who is either a woman who is pure or a “pure woman.” ~John Robert Colombo

Samples

On the Burial of an Infant

When your child dies the way
you once wished it would before its birth,
where do you bury your pain, the guilt,
the shame one part of you casts at the other?

Where do you find the mercy to grieve for yourself,
and not grieve more for the child instead?

Do you lay that self in the grave with your baby,
lay it in earth,
buried together,
victim and killer now side by side,
dead as you wanted that infant dead,
its life the evidence held against you?

Do you tell yourself that you didn't really mean it,
that you were desperate,
afraid,
or sick-
a set of lies you carry like keys
to let yourself in and out of your guilt?

In what dead part of you does she live,
that unborn mother, awaiting
her impending sentence of birth?

Is it her hand that steadies your own
as you lower the flowers upon the grave,
drops a tear from your open eye
like a paltry donation to public decorum?

How can you stand to live with it now,
this love that survives the life that could not,
your own child, a baby.

Death,
in the end,
the better parent:

the one that will never

abandon its own.

Variations on the Word Spirit

Spirit.

A man talks of spirit
like some aphrodisiac
to be scooped from the flesh,
something that ripens
best in the young,
hands eager
to hunt it down

in the deep folds of a virgin's dress.

Spirit.
Something
a man breaks in a filly.
Hot beast bucking under his thighs,
legs pumping
as he straddles the bed.

His mind on a canter when he thinks of that one.

Spirit.
The kind a man drinks at night,
falls down dead,
until, he says, he sees
a Spirit, ghost in the night.
A dead child, son,
a spirit whose death
still moves inside me, memories
of how I prayed to save him,
in the name of the son

and the holy spirit.

Spirit. A verb,
to snatch, in secret.
Carried away like a maid by her master.
Kidnapped. Caught.
No one to help.

Who knows its meaning?
Say it out loud.
Spirit.

A word with as many sides as a woman.

A woman gone missing
from her own life.