Search results for ""Author Mary O'Malley""

The poems in Mary O'Malley's new collection focus on legal separation: of Northern from Southern Ireland, of written Irish from its original script, and of husband from wife. The book explores a season in hell when the verities vanish, the love we live by dies, and the ramparts that shore up our existence are demolished. A marriage breaks down, children leave home, love itself is questioned. What is home now? Where is it? And how do we live when we cannot return? The personal is examined through the lens of the greater human chaos. This is a book about eviction, an examination of the nature of home that is both private and political, written out of a sense of the barbarism that threatens to overwhelm the deep song of Ireland.

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Valparaiso is a book of poems begun at sea on an Irish research ship on which Mary O'Malley was a resident poet. It is a book of searches and discoveries. As the scientists chart a course dictated by the demands of their own researches, as Ireland is careering from boom into bust, Mary O'Malley explores the science of going under and staying afloat. What are the effects of such transformations on the imagination? A key poem, 'Out', escapes from the creative lockdown that the Irish boomtime entailed. She returns to an altered place, and is herself changed by an odyssey that has taken her around the Atlantic and Europe to a kind of homecoming.

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In Mary O'Malley's new collection, the world's at a precarious tipping point; trust in language is breaking down. The poet gives voices to the wolf, the seal and shark, finding new language against peril.

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What is time? Our understanding of it changes, between when the angels rejoiced at the incarnation to when Einstein and then Feynman reconceived it. In the strange, unregulated and disorienting world of the web we experience it in new ways, its predictabilities wrested from us. In Mary O'Malley's Demeter and Persephone sequence, time is experienced through generations, but the new gods play differently and spin the clock hands in their own mischievous ways. New generations find the time-patterns and expectations of their predecessors arcane and incomprehensible, and vice versa. Through mythology and ecology, this book sets out to restore connections. The book opens with oranges orbiting a winter kitchen. Time in its dozen guises moves through the poems, as does fate. Mary O'Malley was appointed 2019 Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

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Joint Winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2018. In Playing the Octopus, her eighth collection of poems, Mary O'Malley's sensitivity to the spirit of Ireland's west coast is as attuned as ever. In a world both earthen and dreamlike, bodily and mythical, a trout is seen to 'swallow light through his skin', a wolf 'howls the great open vowel of his need', and in the emptiness where a tree once stood, 'a tree-shaped brightness dances'. Over the course of the collection, O'Malley twins the Irish west coast with the American east coast, Inis Mor with Coney Island, the parish with the metropolis, the pipes with the axe, each offering its own comfort and wonder. Sylvia Plath, Lois Lane and Antigone feature in an unlikely cast of heroines through which O'Malley tests the mythologies of motherhood and femininity ('no mother is ever good enough until she's dead', writes the poet, with characteristic wit). Playing the Octopus is a body of writing buoyed by the redemptive power and sustaining joy of music, and it closes with O'Malley's translations of the Irish poet Sean O Riordain and the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca.

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This is the first collection by Mary O'Malley to be published by Carcanet Press. From the child colonised, to the adult journey, from Ireland to America to Southern Europe, this is a poetic exploration of love and place and the poet's only true home - the language in which he or she writes.

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