It was making day when I looked out
at the kind of beauty
that leaves death unthinkable,
purple slate, gannets rising in small explosions
and everything makes sense.
The world is round again and we are its sun
describing a horizon, ratskin waves stretch to America
lumps of sea rise under the bow and below
acres of drowned Ireland and a mountain.
    from ‘Resident at Sea’

In 2007 Mary O’Malley made a voyage on the Irish marine research ship the Celtic Explorer. It took her far out into the Atlantic, and it returned her to a self and a country made strange. Valparaiso, a collection begun at sea, is a book of searches and discoveries, plumbing oceanic depths and returning to a shore that ‘marks the start of possibility’. The surge and swell of the sea sounds in it, a place of wonders where the imagination is freed. ‘What would sing in me is the deep ocean.’

As the scientists chart a course dictated by the demands of research, as Ireland is careering from boom to bust, Mary O’Malley explores the science of going under and staying afloat. She returns to an altered place, and is herself changed by an odyssey that has taken her around the Atlantic and Europe, into her past and back to a kind of homecoming.

Poem on a Leaf
The Way
At Jardin des Plantes
Antikythera
Coda
Dido, Grainne, Brid
Recession Eve
Mystical Things
Philoctatea
In the Seminary
Entropy
The Lost Boys
Two Heads in a Landscape
Instress in Ireland
Mercy
The White City
The Lisbon Bride
Israel
Last Night in Paris
The Guide
Still Life
Whom the Gods Love
One Year On


I Sea Road, No Map
II Oceano Nox
III Abyss
IV Shore
V Narthex


Veteris Vestigia Flammae
More Space than Stars
Play It Again, Sam
Homage
Before Winter Comes
Faith
Dreampoem I
Dreampoem II
Interregnum
Civet
Watching the StutteringLovers
If
An Easement for the Chest
Instead of a Proposal
No
Tesseract
Manchester
Coelacanth


The Lusiads
Ekphrasis
The Myth of Language
Crew
Thalassa
Neap
The Shark’s Dream
Caged
Cetorhinus maximus
The Black Glacier
To All Who Are Hopeless withBirds
Statues
Caravaggio’s Hands
Homesick
The Birth of Venus
Climbing the Volcano
The Gulls at Fastnet
Never Merely One Albertine

Notes