Emily Dickinsonís ëconfusioní with which the poem begins.^47 But
here, the silence need not be gendered as in Irigaray whereby women
are the excluded ground of the Symbolic.^48 As ëFacts About Waterí
demonstrates, both female and male figures are presented in
Berkeleyís poetry as being caught within the confines of com-
munication while male poets including Paulin also allude to a leaking
around the limits of language. As in the poem ëThe Girl Who Went To
Live On A Wallí, the absences at the edge of the Symbolic are
imagined as not so much a womanly lack as an excess.
The silence after words is compared with leakiness or drops
hanging for a moment on a tree after rain before falling. This is
enacted in the line breaks whereby words hang on the edge of silence
before falling into the next phrase, as in the gap between ësoundí and
ëof having been thereí. Words are associated with water, fluidity and a
moment where gravity is defied as when a person jumps, hits the line
of gravity and hangs for a moment in mid-air. The poem imagines
hearing the drops in the trees but they cannot be heard except in the
way that they are marked by a silence before they fall. Like Heaney in
his debt to Frost, Berkeleyís poetry is concerned with the edges of
representation or the ëbrimí of language. Berkeleyís concern with
liminality, flight and fluidity also connects her with Paulin whose use
of visionary and existentialist landscapes via Paul Klee dwell on ëa
kind of glitch/ in what youíre sayingí.^49 This ëglitchí is found in
Berkeleyís poem in the syntax of the line: ëthat follows pain getting
wordsí. A more prosaic rendering of this line would be ëthat follows
the pain of getting wordsí. Yet the word ëgettingí jars to suggest that
although words are given to us, getting and begetting them is painful.
The poetic voice is presented as not entirely in control and the pain of
ëgetting wordsí is evoked by the ungrammatical syntax where the
poetic voice flutters or stutters over the line.
Such stuttering is described by Gilles Deleuze in his essay on
poetry entitled ëHe Stutteredí (1994) where:
47 Cf. Ann Owens Weekes, ‘“ An Origin like Water” : The Poetry of Eavan Boland
and Modernist Critiques of Irish Literature’ Bucknell Review, Vol.28, No.1,
1994, pp.159–76.
48 Cf. Irigaray, ‘Plato’s Hysteria’, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian
Gill (New York: Cornell, 1985).
49 Paulin, ‘Almost There’, p.21.