'TO PROVE MY BLOOD' | A review Poet reflects on life and heritage

The YSU professor imbues his prose with poetic sensibility.
By THERESA M. HEGEL
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
"To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigrations and the Afterlife," by Philip Brady (The Ashland Poetry Press, $14.95)
"To Prove My Blood," an autobiographical work by professor and poet Philip Brady, is surprisingly slender for a memoir. Weighing in at only 121 pages, the book easily will be dwarfed by its larger cousins on library shelves, but it certainly should not be overlooked.
Brady's prose is thick with nuance and lush with metaphor. In this way, it is more like poetry than conventional prose. He conveys a wide range of emotion, a vast expanse of experience with an economy of words and images.
The narrative flits erratically -- and without regard to chronology -- through the past, stopping at points to reveal snippets from Brady's childhood living in a Brooklyn row home. Brady spends several chapters reflecting on his detective father's biggest homicide case: a woman accused of killing her two young children. His father never believed her guilty, and those convictions changed both his and his family's lives.
Brady lights on his time spent volunteering with the Peace Corps, a stint during which he taught at the University of Lubumbashi in Zaire and fell in love with a married Belgian woman. He jumps from living in Cork, Ireland, to staying at an artist's colony in San Francisco to sitting in his office and staring at the computer's blue screen crafting this very memoir.
Exploring heritage
"To Prove My Blood" is also an account of Brady's bloodline, a recording of his mother's family's emigration from Ireland. It is a tribute to and a recreation of the lives of his mother and three aunts -- the McCann sisters. His explorations into their past and imagined inner lives are sometimes fanciful, sometimes poignant.
The memoir functions as a contemplation of mortality and meditation on the difficulties of revealing our truest feelings to the ones to whom we're supposed to be the closest. The passages in which he interacts with his infirm Aunt Mary, the eldest and last surviving McCann sister, are some of the most moving, though perhaps the most difficult, to read. Also moving is the way he lays bare his longing for approval and understanding from his late father.
Brady ends "To Prove My Blood" with three poems that summarize, with even greater economy than the prose that precedes them, the story of his life and heritage. They are a fitting conclusion to such a lyrical work.
Brady is a professor of English at Youngstown State University and director of its Poetry Center. He has previously published two books of poetry, "Weal" and "Forged Correspondences."
hegel@vindy.com