O'Malley Playing the Octopus

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78410-281-4
Verlag: Carcanet Poetry
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 96 Seiten

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 Mór 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 Seán Ó Ríordáin and the Spaniard Federico García Lorca.

Mary O'Malley was born in Connemara in Ireland and educated at University College Galway. She has served on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cuirt International Poetry Festival for eight years. For ten years she taught on the MA programmes for Writing and Education in the Arts at NUI Galway, and held the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2013. She is currently the University of Limerick Writer in Residence, and has held previous residencies in Paris, Tarragona, New York, and Derry. A member of the Irish artists association Aosdána, O'Malley is a vocal advocate of environmental education, particularly marine, and writes and broadcasts regularly for RTE Radio, Ireland's National Public Service Broadcaster.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Malley, Mary