Description

This powerful new collection combines Katie Donovan's unflinching insight into our human foibles with her exceptional descriptive gift. The years of her husband's throat cancer are charted in poems by turns tender, harsh and darkly humorous. Donovan gives voice to the carer's duty of being the one who watches, and contains, what is both a searing tragedy and a chainlink of domestic chores. Meanwhile the sulky electrician and the garrulous taxi driver are part of a cast of unlikely extras who provide a contextual chorus from the everyday world that inevitably carries on. Donovan grasps talismans of survival: birds foraging in the snow; her daughter's singing - which lights up the hospice in midwinter - and her son's success at soccer. The title-poem resists the classic definition of the grieving widow, instead capturing one of Donovan's enduring motifs - the moment when the mask slips and the true human response is released.

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Paperback / softback by Katie Donovan

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This powerful new collection combines Katie Donovan's unflinching insight into our human foibles with her exceptional descriptive gift. The years... Read more

    Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
    Publication Date: 29/09/2016
    ISBN13: 9781780373164, 978-1780373164
    ISBN10: 1780373163

    Number of Pages: 64

    Fiction , Poetry

    Description

    This powerful new collection combines Katie Donovan's unflinching insight into our human foibles with her exceptional descriptive gift. The years of her husband's throat cancer are charted in poems by turns tender, harsh and darkly humorous. Donovan gives voice to the carer's duty of being the one who watches, and contains, what is both a searing tragedy and a chainlink of domestic chores. Meanwhile the sulky electrician and the garrulous taxi driver are part of a cast of unlikely extras who provide a contextual chorus from the everyday world that inevitably carries on. Donovan grasps talismans of survival: birds foraging in the snow; her daughter's singing - which lights up the hospice in midwinter - and her son's success at soccer. The title-poem resists the classic definition of the grieving widow, instead capturing one of Donovan's enduring motifs - the moment when the mask slips and the true human response is released.

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