Pádraig Ó Tuama breaks down the poem 'reconciliation' by Jónína Kirton, a poem featured for National Poetry Day 2022. ‘Reconciliation’ comes from Jónína Kirton’s book An Honest Woman (Talon Books, 2017) and this analysis also appears in Pádraig's upcoming book Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (Canongate Books, 2022).  

‘reconciliation’ begins with a question: ‘how will I reconcile myself?’ This is not reconciliation to another person – ‘how can I be reconciled to them? – but about the speaker’s rela­tionship to herself. Many poems centre on the question of ‘Who am I?’ but here we have a slant to that query. Who can I be? this poem asks, and because of a split self, the speaker of the poem searches for an image of a bridge that will support her need to reconcile her mixed heritages.

Jónína Kirton is a Canadian poet of Métis and Icelandic heritage. Métis are a distinct Indigenous group who have both Indigenous and European ancestry – ‘métis’ is the French word for ‘mixed’. In Canada there are particular areas, slightly north of Manitoba, especially, that have a long and distinct connection with Icelanders.

A bridge is a feat of engineering. How much of a load can it bear? How deep does it need to be anchored on each side? What modifications to the land on either side of a bridge are necessary? As Jónína Kirton imagines a bridge between Métis and Icelander culture she recog­nises the danger of using a typical bridge as a metaphor. Anchors weaken the earth, and the bridge might ‘swing wildly’. Were she to build a bridge between Iceland and Canada, what safety nets would such a feat of engineering demand, she wonders? Then there’s those waves, those ‘rushing / waters below’. Such a bridge fails even the imagination: open to structural failures and also attacks: enemies who’d cut supportive cables. Threats above and below; threats from structures, threats from others. There’s a sense of crisis in the poem. It’s clever to use this metaphor – a stretched and perhaps flimsy bridge – in order to speak about of feeling personally stretched, at risk of collapse, or attack.

The crisis culminates at the end of the first stanza: ‘maybe one day I will just float away / see where the water takes me’. Is this abandonment? Or giving up, or ending? The tensions Jónína holds are tensions that go to the very fibre of existence.

A linebreak, between two todays, begins to address the crisis. In a poem about unbridgeable places a break is used in order to move the poem towards strength. The poetic form itself implies that not everything that’s separated needs to be split. A new way of holding split selves together is considered: ‘today // today I will rebuild’.

In the second stanza, rather than abandon the idea of a bridge, Kirton abandons the idea of building, imagining instead a bridge that grows. Once, in a public reading I found online, she shared how she researched bridges from around the world, then landed on living root bridges found in India; bridges made not of steel, but of the roots of trees stretched across chasms. The oldest of these bridges is thought to be five hundred years old. Something living – a tree – can be held in the earth in a way that allows the earth and the plant to be mutually sustaining. A living root bridge is part of the earth, spans the chasms of the earth, and lives; it is not just a means to an end, rather it’s a breathing thing itself. Where does one tree end and another begin? The answer is that something new is created in the in-between. In the zero-sum game of having to cut off one of her identities, Kirton rejects the binary choice, instead seeing her body as a type of living bridge, nurtured by the earth of two places, sustained by both, alive across its entire span.

Many of Jónína’s poems are a search for self, or even a reclamation of a self. She published her first poetry collec­tion at the age of sixty. Against a backdrop of ageism, misogyny and identity erasure, her poetry argues for, asserts and creates self-narration.

Many people might remember learning about metaphor in poetry classes at school. Kirton says that her experience is of being a bridge; not being like a bridge. She’s using the concrete image of a bridge and creating a direct poetic line between those structures and the circumstances of her life and identities. She searches for the right kind of bridge to use – in this way, she’s feeling for the right metaphor. Bridges are walked on, put under stress, stretched. Supported yes, but under strain. Kirton is in need – physically, as well as emotionally and culturally – of a new way to describe her multiple-cultured life. The poem models a creative way of self-support: in a time of difficulty, pay attention to the images that come to mind; study them, research them – it might be that your intuition’s landing on something more supportive than you think.

‘reconciliation’ responds to a binary choice – choose one identity, reject the other – and replaces singularity with multi­plicity. Jónína Kirton’s poem is an act of defiance, imagination, research and hospitality. It is an act of reconciliation.