After a background in Fine Art, Jim Conwell worked for over thirty-six years in the field of mental health as a psychoanalytical psychotherapist. He has had poems published in magazines in the UK, Ireland, Australia and North America and his work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize. He lives in London, England.

Conwell’s poems in Immigrant Journey (Dempsey & Windle 2024) cover difficult ground. The child of Irish immigrants, they concern his personal experience of the class system in England, attendance at a Catholic primary school and a ‘sink-hole’ (his words) Secondary Modern, his difficult relationship with a non-communicative father and his struggle to try to live a different life. In an extended Afterword which gives some background to the collection, Conwell says he was ‘part of the Counter-Culture’ that, ‘fuelled by hallucinogenic insight,’ thought they were ‘remaking the world.’ His father was furious with him. The feeling was mutual. ‘Our worlds simply didn’t touch. Except in conflict. I was thirty before my father and I began to seek to repair some of the damage we had wrought but then he died suddenly. I feel unbearable shame when I see myself as I think my father saw me and when I think how hopeless the relationship we made together was.’

Cast in the style of a memoir, these confessional poems inhabit bleak territory. If I were asked to find one word to describe the over-arching theme of this collection, it would be ‘dislocation.’ It begins with the uprooting from one’s homeland, the difficulty of fitting in with the class system and the conflict between Conwell and his father. In ‘Like a Fist’ Conwell gives us a flavour of his unflinching, plain-speaking style of writing:

My father was a tall man
And I the child in his shadow.
There was something dark about him
Like a loaded fist.
Or teeth scattering suddenly on lino
With a mouth that tastes of blood.

There is a dislocation from Catholicism, a faith which Conwell describes as ‘demanding absolute adherence to rigid beliefs and practices; an unquestioned routine in rural Ireland but challenged by modern, urban life.’ In ‘Catechism’ ‘God is a sniper. / Always behind you…/ He might just decide, on the cusp / of any moment, to pick you off.’ In ‘Dislocations’ Conwell is ready to ‘live with the truth that life is a whole series of dislocations’ but then, not being able to live with that premise, he tells us that he tries to find connections between one thing and another but comes to the conclusion that the only connection is ‘grief and mourning’ neither of which are welcome at his door. As a noun ‘dislocation’ is viewed as a disturbance from a proper, original, or usual place or state. It is also a word that we use to describe an injury or disability caused when the normal position of a joint or other part of the body is disturbed. To Conwell, the whole of life seems to be out of joint, mentally, physically and spiritually.

Some of his finest poems are those which speak for others who find themselves, like him, heavy-laden. Here, to end with, is his poem titled ‘Incident in the Park’:

A woman is sitting on a park bench.
And from the pram near her
come the murderous
and desperate screams of her baby.

Next to her sits
the baby’s guardian angel.
And he tells her no, she cannot leave the child there.

Someone will come shortly, she pleads.
Someone who may know what to do.
But the angel is unbending.
If nothing else binds you, he says,
then let it be guilt.

This is a powerful collection. Reading it is like being punched in the gut. Its honesty will leave you reeling.