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ValparaisoMary O'Malley![]() 10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, Irish, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (96 pages) (Pub. May 2012) 9781847771353 £9.95 £8.96 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. May 2012) 9781847776471 £9.95 £8.96 eBook (Kindle) (Pub. May 2012) 9781847776488 £9.95 £8.96 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have, or are prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
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. I 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 II Resident at Sea I Sea Road, No Map II Oceano Nox III Abyss IV Shore V Narthex III 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 IV 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
Awards won by Mary O'Malley
Joint winner, 2018 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award
(Playing the Octopus)
'Mary O'Malley's seascapes [...] are suffused with such beauty and sonorous mystery and rhythmic care that they lift us above ourselves and the time we inhabit.'
Colm Tóibín, Irish Times, 8th December 2012
Praise for Mary O'Malley
'Gaudent Angeli is a significant addition to the opus of a poet serious about her art... O'Malley excels when she combines the high with the low, such as in 'Little Dazzler' which manages to include Odysseus, a sorceress, condoms, smartphones, and a "supermodel in a green tube dress".'Kevin Higgins, Galway Advertiser 'very fine and hugely varied collection of poetry' Colette Sheridan, Irish Examiner 'O'Malley is a true artist in sketching the beautiful, small details without which the essence of place, and the identity dependent on it, can be all too easily erased.' Eavan Boland 'This new collection by one of Ireland's most respected and radical poets is as exhilarating a read as the title promises. Sampling through levels of irony from the neolithic to the neon lights of the lonely cities, from east to west, and indeed the hackneyed wesht (with a characteristically wicked eye), O'Malley offers us lyrics of the salvific quotidian woven together with the surreal elements of surviving our island paradoxes. Insouciant as the pirate queen Grace O'Malley who downfaced Elizabeth the First, Mary O'Malley steps into a zone of power and mastery with these new poems.' Paula Meehan
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