“The woman in black silk and funeral veil unveils the plaque for Okjökull – A letter to the future.” So begins the title story of To Avenge a Dead Glacier, a sprawling, genre-defying piece that opens in Iceland at a ceremony for a vanished glacier.
From there, the story shifts, travelling from desolate plains to working-class Irish kitchens, tunnels beneath protest camps and the fluorescent numbness of supermarket aisles. It is about environmental collapse, but also grief, class, memory, protest and legacy.
The opening story, Dino Matcha, moves with a stream-of-consciousness poetic rhythm, threading together the lives of graffiti artist Dino Matcha and Charlie Clarence, a Scottish immigrant and father. Dino’s art is both invocation and exorcism, an attempt to remake his crumbling town, which, he says, “never got over that missed penalty against Milan in 1975″.
The generational damage is raw, and Charlie’s regret and Dino’s fractured philosophy come to a quiet, shattering point by the riverbank, where the only act of healing is putting socks on someone else’s feet.
The weight of inheritance presses against every story. In Hush Mavourneen, the Police Are Watching, one of the collection’s most delicate and devastating pieces, a man named Gerald navigates the challenging waters of queer identity in a rural town that both sees too much and refuses to see at all. “You can’t undo a tattoo,” he says, half-prayer, half-warning.
Tivenan never lets his characters become symbols. They bleed, long, ache, and remain. His stories move through landscapes of erosion and disrepair, yet resist despair. There is poetry in the pain, rendered in sentences both honed and raw.
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Moving from the gritty to the tender, Tivenan shifts gears later in the collection with Resurrection of a Corncrake, where the narrator’s reflection on lost land creates a sense of nostalgia mixed with regret. The cement mixer, with its “burnt oil” that “won’t make it back down to where it came from”, becomes a potent symbol of irreversible damage.
To Avenge a Dead Glacier is a collection that listens closely to the silences – environmental, familial, societal – and makes something luminous out of them. Tivenan is not just chronicling collapse; he is giving voice to the bones beneath the ruin and the small beauties that survive. A vital, visionary debut.
