A review of Seang (Hungering) by Anne Casey – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Elizabeth Walton

Seang (Hungering)
by Anne Casey
Salmon Poetry
June 2025, ISBN: 978-1-915022-89-9, Paperback, 158 Pages

How can we understand British colonial rule of Ireland if we allow atrocities to recede into the curtains of history? On reading Anne Casey’s latest work, it seems that to speak of hunger under such oppression is to “speak back to Empire” (p14). It also seems that the easiest way to break people down is to starve them, systematically ban their language, and to ban as well, their gods, and then their children.

Like Casey, cover artist Anthony Quinn is an Irishman living in Sydney—a city founded on the unceded land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. In a striking pen and ink rendering, Quinn presents a mythical dead crow which, in its quietest hour, is asked to carry the national sorrow of An Gorta Mór (The Great Irish Famine) whose peak years lasted from “1845 until 1849” (p125). As the crow’s lifeless wings are wrapped around its decaying body in a bleak burial blanket, a stippled beak renders the bird incapable of continuing to sing or cry “Cá, cá, cá—” (p29). Like the children of the famine softly calling for their mothers, the bird eventually falls silent.

Launched during “Samhain” (p103) on the 180th anniversary of the Great Irish Famine, Seang (Hungering) sings to the spirit of the famine refugees, so that those who have never experienced hunger may understand. As the Irish saying in the epigraph reminds us, “A well-fed person doesn’t understand a hungering one” (p6).

During the Great Famine, the British used food as a weapon of control until it awakened

“the one-eyed crone, Cailleach an Diabhail—

plague-maker,”

…a sleeping daemon who…

“unleashed

her shadowhound, Dormath

from his station at the gate of death

to deliver a blight” (p21).

Casey retraces the lives of some of the thousands of Irish girls sent to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, and their daughters who are repeatedly incarcerated and kept in solitary confinement. Girls are punished for minor infractions, including “irreverent behaviour” (p57) in church. Whether they become domestic servants or are coerced into the sex industry, these girls are treated as expendable commodities in the colonial economy. As a third of their people starve to death, the colonisers criticise their “crocodile tears” (p24) while food laden ships are sent to England under armed guard. As Casey so brutally describes:

“mothers scrabbled in stinking dungheaps

for a scrap of black and festering tuber

to feed their silent children” (p23)

The British meanwhile use the opportunity created by the famine to evict their starving tenants and convert their sprawling estates into more profitable grazing pastures.

Casey grew up in her grandfather’s house in County Clare, which was eventually rebuilt after British soldiers burned it down in the latter days of British rule in 1920. This knowledge haunts Casey as she travels to Sydney, where she soon discovers that many of girls in the Newcastle Industrial School were daughters of the Irish famine. As the creative artefact of her recently completed PhD, Casey revisits the women whoe were shipped from Ireland to Australia during the great “ ‘refugee’ exodus” (p13). The result is a distinctively sparse yet innocent and lyric voice which reclaims the narratives of those who perished as footnotes to colonial history. Casey breathes tender life into “Gaeilge” (p14)—the Irish language prohibited under British colonial rule long before the poet was born. Casey beguiles the reader into walk with her people; into seeing them, and witnessing what they endured.

Casey’s capacity to articulate hunger not merely as a physical condition but as a tyrannical punishment is acknowledged by both Judith Beveridge and Sarah Holland-Batt. But it is also endorsed by Professor Eamonn Wall from the University of Missouri-St Louis, who finds this to be a “furious, graceful, and deeply moving work of literary witness,” (p1). This response underscores Casey’s succinct and whip-smart lyric:

“your arm still

extended around your infant son,

bundled with a hundred twiglike others—

today’s bitter harvest

to be planted with the rest.” (p27)

The poems migrate between historical documentation and poetic reimagining as Casey recites the story through lullabies, nursery rhymes, street songs, Aislings, and variations on traditional verse. These forms are presented as dialogic, compressed fragments, until the ghosts of her archival girls may “be heard in our time” (15).

Born at Shanagolden in County Limerick in 1851, baby Eliza O’Brien sets out on a voyage from Plymouth to Sydney with her family. Here, the poems assume the names of official documents in “Live Exports to Sydney” (p37) and “Bill of Lading” (p38). The ship sails for “one hundred and seven day” (p37), carrying “twenty-two married couples and two hundred and thirty-four Irish orphan girls” (p37). When young Eliza’s mother dies, her brief life becomes a bellwether for the countless women who perished under colonial control.

As Casey observes that the world is inhabited by “473 million Elizas” (p15), her poetry bears “witness” (p15) as much as it presents resistance and protest. Her Gaelic sensibility resounds as she encounters the shocking reality of what these travelers faced upon arrival:

“sixteen months in Goulburn Gaol,

eleven in solitary—

a very small room

with very small grating

near the ceiling;

it was boarded,

no furniture of any kind.” (p40)

Renowned Australian poet, Henry Lawson referred to Darlinghurst prison as “Starvinghurst Gaol” (p49)—a moniker not unlike Toby Zoates’ iconic graffiti. Which was  painted on a nearby slum wall in the 1980s. His phrase, “Darling, It Hurts”, became a song title for Paul Kelly and The Coloured Girls. Like Kelly’s prostitute, the girl in Casey’s poem has also become a sex worker. But where Kelly’s girl is missed by a lover, Casey’s girl grieves her infant who has died in the cell beside her (p41).

“Between the Fever Hospital and the Poorhouse” (p29) appears beside an English translation, as if to force the violence of its witnessing into the language of the colonisers. Rather than discovering the greater fortunes that were sometimes promised to convince Irish to give up their lands and move to Australia, these girls are treated as “ragged parent-deserted juveniles” (p45) who “infest the lanes and alleys” (p45), and are destined to become “thimble riggers, poachers and prostitutes” (p45). Though people offer to “adopt” (p45) the healthiest girls, this doesn’t necessarily improve their fate.

As six, or sometimes seven-year-old girls have their virginity verified “according to the doctor’s exacting hand,” (p67), the fate of chilren whose mothers were shipped to Australia to provide “fit wives for the labouring” (p38) and “good servants for the wealthier classes” (p38) remains problematic. In Sydney, they are repeatedly punished and starved as they mend other people’s lives:

“a stitch in time

saved nine;

tenth in line—

tow the line,

stitch…

and survive” (p73).

Casey explicitly frames the calculated brutality of British rule during the Great Irish Famine not as a natural disaster but as a colonial crime. Like a visit to the “Scarcity Commission” (p30), the mechanisms of tyranny return like blight to the nation’s rotting potato crops. This is a poetry which witnesses starvation; it witnesses religious and cultural bans, and ultimately, it is witness to the systematic removal of children.

To the tune of Dear Liza, a hole in the belly is filled by “a rich gent” (p79), who leaves something else behind, so that a new problem arises: what to do with the children of these daughters of Ireland. Catherine Jr is jailed as fast as the police can bury her infant’s body, while a grandmother drowns her young daughter’s child (p83). And then there is Young Jane Davis, a child who is found “living in sin” (p85), with “a man from the steamers (p85)”. She eventually marries a “Singapore sailor” (p85), laying her son to rest under a “bark roof” with “mud-walls” (p85). When she is falsely accused of murder, her children are taken away, spinning the cycle of loss steadfastly into the next generation. Many years later, Eliza writes back home, where she decries, “it was the streets of Sydney reared us” (p91).

As in headlines which flood today’s news with the infamous Epstein files, Eliza finds there are “people who have uses for young girls” (p95). A carer believes in the benevolence of a “model gentleman” (p95) who sexually assaults a child. Such is the outright oppression of young women, that Eliza, at the age of fifteen, tries to raise the alarm. Instead, she finds herself imprisoned for attempting to tell the truth of it.

The violence of linguistic erasure resonates strongly in the Australian context, and the history of First Nations peoples who were subjected to the familiar colonial oppressions of dispossession, language prohibitions, and child removal policies. Where Casey reinvigorates the languages that were banned, she creates a bridge between old Ireland and new—as well as between old Australia and new. People in both countries are now relearning the languages their ancestors were forbidden from speaking.

At the same time, Casey traces the evolution of child removal laws in New South Wales from the nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century, revealing a continuous logic of state control that disproportionately targets the poor, the female, and the culturally marginalised. Casey insists on moral accountability, in a way that aligns with questions which surround the oppressive child removal policies which have impacted countless thousands of Australians, many indigenous as well as many where were not. In Australia, First Nations children continue to experience removal rates far exceeding those of non-Indigenous children — a reality often linked to the ongoing legacy of the Stolen Generations. Such episodes are rarely mere relics from the past.

Just when she ought, Casey steps in as the narrator, splitting the conversation open in “sweet retribution” with her own impressions of all she has learned from her family life as well as the archive (p112). This is Casey’s lament to the sea which she says, “swallowed a quarter of a million of my kind” (p113):

“but here’s what I know: all our oceans

meet somewhere sometime, so what

are you going to do

with this one

precious

wild?”  (p113).

The closing poems link the potato famine to climate disruption, which causes political instability in Sudan as well as other places where child displacement is still a living reality.

Perhaps unknowingly, Casey has also aligns her observations with recent climate emergencies — including Hurricane Dorian (2019) and Hurricane Maria (2017) — when adoption was once again urged as a valid response to humanitarian crisis, rather than considering ways to support families impacted by climate disruption. Child removal ideation, it seems, can rapidly be reactivated, anywhere, at any time.

Casey deliberately positions Seang (Hungering) as a warning for a future world, one where a return to horrors of the past could once again become very real. In these ways, Seang (Hungering) offers a powerful invocation to the human stories silenced by oppressors, which are as relevant today as they ever were. In Casey’s delicate, precisely crafted incantations, this warning is destined to stay alive in the minds of all who engage with her exquisite work.

About the reviewer: Elizabeth Walton is a freelance writer, musician and visual artist/photographer writing about nature, the arts and life. She has a Masters of Creative Writing and Masters of Research (Creative Writing) and is presently completing her PhD in Creative Writing. Alongside artistic work, she has presented her academic research at conferences and produced journalistic work for Reuters, The Australia, The Guardian and The ABC. Her first solo publication will be released in 2026 by 5 Islands Press.