Poetry: Begging for Vultures

As published in Irish America Magazine, Review of Books
February / March 2012  p. 66-67

A couple of pages into Lawrence Welsh’s Begging for Vultures, and your breathing begins to slow. The heart steadies, and, reluctantly, the mind quiets. A subway car can easily become the desert. The flashes of electricity which illuminate the tunnel look like heat lightning, and the voice crackling over the loudspeaker begins to sound more and more like the cawing of a distant crow. Reading the latest collection from this El Paso professor is a wholly meditative experience. The language is sparse, like the land it reflects. Change – relentless when unwelcome and lacking when needed – is a recurring theme, as are whiskey and the folkloric coyote.

That Welsh is a first-generation Irish American might come as a surprise, given the Southwestern setting. But he does slip in nods to his Irish heritage throughout, playing with the obvious clashes, and the less obvious similarities, between the two cultures. In a poem called “New Irish Whiskey,” he writes, “an ad tonight / for michael collins’ / irish whiskey // ‘the big fellow’ / it says // my god / i think of crazy horse / malt liquor / and its disappearance // but i will not drink / my heroes now/ i will not puke / or genuflect / on their graves.” Welsh manages to do in a few words what others fail to achieve with entire tomes. He creates a world so alive that it does not disappear with the turn of the page, but lingers inside the imagination, open to independent exploration. It is as if the reader has not simply finished a collection of poetry, but has instead just returned from an unexpected visit with an Irishman in the desert.

(212 pages/ University of New Mexico Press/ $21.95)