It was about time. Clíodhna Bhreatnach’s Pink roses, green is a collection of poems about working time. While that may, at first, seem as a reductive description of the broad set of themes Bhreatnach captures in her verse, this collection reminds us just how wide and all-encompassing the concept is. In its negative space, it has leisure. In its core, it has the question of labour, creation and transformation of value, its social, communal and individual impact. The point is in the purpose & the use, to borrow from Bhreatnach herself. Fourteen poems included in this selection give meaning to work, to spaces of work and life, to pubs, offices and the work-from-home liminality. Nothing is meaningless, nothing is worthless; Bhreatnach makes sure to give attention to elements commonly discarded as mundane, in 21st century poetics of Lefebvrian everydayness.
Just like the spaces she writes of and in, people of Bhreatnach’s poems are a delightful album of interlocutors and confidants. I love Paul, who is carrying a ladder and on his way to fix something—I think he fixed a lot.
Bhreatnach’s poetic vignettes paint frames from a life common and familiar to a range of generations in today’s Ireland. Picturesque, appealing to all the human senses, Bhreatnach’s language consistently provides the full experience of moments she writes about. Yet, the documentary in verse does not distract from the motive behind the motif—the fundamental forces at work and inspiring the writing.
The references to modern times, anchoring this collection in 2025, are more than points of temporal authenticity. Bhreatnach shows fundamental understanding of the political economy of labour, the slow and powerful dialectics of the (southern) (Irish) state, and what makes us social. Bhreatnach’s language is modern, but casts a wide net in capturing a melodic quality for her lyrical imagery, within a carefully crafted (Hiberno-)English frame punctured with breaks, breaths encoded in blanks flowing across the pages.
Bhreatnach loves, works, struggles and so does her reader. On a tour of her workplace, home, and third spaces of social, environmental, and cultural fulfilment, the reader glimpses the history of Ireland, the people and the state, and the processes that led to the polycrisis of today.
The dreams and longings of the poet and the people in her verse are human and humane, and yet so grounded in the material reality of our (working) time; there is a particular quality to them that makes the reader wonder on the ways to change the world. Readers may have only interpreted the world, in various ways–the point, however, was always to change it. I, for one, am grateful to Clíodhna Bhreatnach for giving us a lyrical motive for changing it. As she writes at the end of another poem, not included in this pamphlet
Tiny cartoonish struggling people I love you Get up
Pink roses, green by Clíodhna Bhreatnach (Green Bottle Press, 2025) is available from Connolly Books, Temple Bar, Dublin 2 or www.connollybooks.org
