Description
Book SynopsisThe Mining Road, Leanne O'Sullivan's third poetry collection, finds inspiration in the disused copper mines that haunt the rugged terrain around Allihies, near her home at Beara, in West Cork. Like remnants of a lost world, the mines' ruined towers, shafts, man-engines and dressing floors, evoke an elemental landscape in which men and women laboured above as well as underground, and even mined in caverns below sea level. Mining promotes a sense of memory, and the riches embedded in the landscape are human as well as material. But things brought to the surface can have a startling ability to shine in the present, and O'Sullivan's poems move and provoke as they resonate with experiences at the heart of contemporary Ireland.
Trade ReviewO’Sullivan shifts away from the kind of “topographical” poetry of place that has become common in Irish writing, choosing instead to locate the place’s meaning in “all of us listening”. O’Sullivan repeatedly presents us with objects or places, which then act not as statements of arrival or recovery but as points of departure. Things we have seen before, often in other people’s poems, come alive again in her hands… The Mining Road is a strong and varied book of poems… slow and concentrated pieces that register with great clarity the mystery of stories and images that exercise power over us, images and stories on which readers will dwell. At a time when historians, novelists and journalists are again revising our national narratives, these thoughtful, ambitious poems bring the past to life, but they also ask if any imagination of the past, no matter how rich and inevitable it feels, can ever be quite enough. -- John McAuliffe * The Irish Times *
Table of ContentsThe Road 13 Townland 14 You Were Born at Mealtime 15 Irish Weather 16 Parcel 18 The Mining Road 19 Oracle 20 House Lore 22 Love Stories 23 Lightening 24 Antique Cabinets 25 Vincit Qui Se Vincit 26 Song 27 Cuckoo-spirit 28 Argos 29 Brigie 30 The Boundary Journey 32 The Lights of New York 34 Endeavour The Store 37 Storehouse 38 Man Engine 43 Safe House 45 Puxley Castle, Dunboy 46 Heirloom 47 Hearing Mass 48 Polaris 49 Neighbour 51 Fraoch 52 Valentine 53 Departures 54 Car Phone 55 Sparrow 56 Station Mass 57 The Glimmerman 58 A Healing 59 Dream 61 Notes
