Trust the Damage

“Every sickness gets better or kills.
I am the strangeness in-between.”

In Trust the Damage, her deeply intimate debut poetry collection, Trudie Gorman explores the connection between class, poverty, and illness. Journeying from a council estate in the 90s to the fractured ecosystem of the present day, she contends with the grief of losing her body to illness, whilst also finding hope and connection.

The body in all of its morphisms is the main character here, while memory, legacy, violence against women, healthcare, working-class culture and love ripple through the collection in vibrant coexistence. The poems are at once visceral and unflinching in their depictions, yet always stretch towards the light, capturing what it means for a life to bloom in the dark.

“Original, arresting and brave, Trudie Gorman’s debut collection, Trust the Damage, is a deft and uncompromising exploration of chronic illness, trauma, urbanity, class, and how these elements combine to profoundly impact the relationship with the self. Gorman’s is an urgent, fresh and essential new voice in Irish poetry.”
—Victoria Kennefick

“In this startling collection Trudie Gorman dares the reader to look at the sicknesses that riddle society, the ones we refuse to acknowledge. These are poems of violence and tenderness, of love and fear, of fury and survival.”
—Alice Kinsella

Trust the Damage, then, acts as a damning indictment of the circular nature of these societally and governmentally imposed hardships, and the ways in which they feed each other, so that the breaking, the damage, seems inevitable. But it’s also a love note to Gorman’s own body and to the bodies of all those that need one, for all that we have survived, and all that we have yet to face. It is a balm and a battle cry, for a time in which to be poor and disabled is apparently one of the worst things a person can be. Worse still if you also happen to be a woman.
—Aimee Godfrey, Poetry Ireland Review

“This collection expands on the concept of what sickness really is. Gorman begins with the damaged body, but then explores abusive relationships, the unjust medical system, and the cost of living crisis. All exhibit symptoms of disease and they are all interconnected. The suffering body of the female patient is linked to the body of the murdered animal, which (ironically) is offered as a cure for the pernicious anaemia with which she is diagnosed. The politics of gender-based violence reflect on the dismissals of doctors, the behaviour of the Gardaí towards the homeless, and “The housing crisis sick with want.” By the end of this collection, it is worth asking whether the body is the most broken being featured here, or if it is instead a rare flare of defiance in a chronically damaged world.”
— Dr Karina Jakubowicz, Magma

TRUST THE DAMAGE

I forgot that things still grow in the night.
There’s whole species under the sea
that light up in moonlight,
the soft glow guiding small creatures home.

We once thought that it was a sign
pointing to the edge of the world.
Nothing about god’s kingdom,
just a dark ending to fall from.

I’m a small creature too, limping towards home.
The edge of my world had to come first:
the monster of my own sick blood,
I spent years not going easy.

Going savage in fact, going fatal,
until I came to surrender to the places
that this body takes me. I don’t have to love
the days I can’t crawl through or the nights

I wake paralysed.
I know I’ll long for the next time
I’m lying on the kitchen floor waiting for the song
of yet another ambulance,

so that I don’t have to
convince myself this was never meant to be.
I trust the damage.
Open the portal for the paramedics to arrive
into my emergency, and their night shift.
And as this ordinary rescue ripples,
I know I’ll wake in the morning still sick,
but quietly baptised in the stars.

Trust the Damage. Trudie Gorman
25 March 2024
ISBN 9781915629241 HB
ISBN 9781915629258 PB
Cover image by David Underland

See Also: Trudie Gorman in The Journal