DOLORES STEWART is a bilingual poet from the west of Ireland. Her first collection with the Dedalus Press, In Out of the Rain, was published in 1999, and since then she has published two collections of poems in Irish with Coiscéim, Sé Sin Le Rá (2001) and An Cosán Dearg (2003). Of her new collection, Dolores Stewart writes: "The poems in Presence of Mind explore aspects of consciousness in the light of modern philosophy and engage with the early Greek concept of aletheia, i.e. that which emerges into presence, mediated through the Heideggerean notion of language as the house of being, as that which 'lets things be'. Thus, language is used in this collection not to attempt answers, or even to clarify questions, but rather to clear a space by way of poetic thinking."
"Dolores Stewart's Presence of Mind exhibits a sensibility profoundly shaped by the Western canon. Spencer and Wittgenstein, Plato and Dante, Trakl, Max Beckman and Rembrandt, are among the book's real presences. Stewart is a poet without pretension, however. Her wider European culture is as fully-assimilated as the detailed idiom of local speech - in Off the Record - or a Connemara townland, in Wittgenstein in Connemara; a poem whose frank synthesis of thought with concrete experience has the Wittgenstein who "knew about the things that couldn't be said" as a local countryman, living alone with "the sight of colour slipping/ from the backbone of a mackerel sky". Elsewhere, in language pared down to take its own weight, Antigone is "like a chickenbone/In the royal throat"; Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus with filmic accuracy. In a deftly-articulated reworking, in Double Take, Echo dreams of "an escape from the last//Pair of see-saw fricatives". Beautifully exact, these poems wear their undoubted intelligence lightly. This is a book of real substance, which deserves to be widely-read."
—The Irish Times
Reviews of In Out of the Rain
"Highly personal and spiritual poetry dominated by a drive to claim a space for women in the mystic traditions of Irish Christianity"
—Kirkus Reviews
"...a mature debut deserving close attention"
—David Wheatley, Sunday Tribune
