What good to her is the mind's cold elegy,
the pen's fluency? Give her a tune.
Let her enter herself through the curtain parted
by music.

from 'Untitled'

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, 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.

'[Mary 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