By Eva Bourke

Piano

2011 collection by much-admired German born poet and translator long since living in Galway

Description

“In these new poems Eva Bourke leans into what she calls the “heart of things,” discovering for herself, and us, time and again that there truly is a heart of things, and to things, and that it might well survive all that conspires against it, even in the most war-broken, besieged, and harm-full places on earth. These poems suggest that the soul is an enduring gentleness in us, in others, in perhaps everything, and that it needs us to release it, to let it breathe, to nourish it with what we create rather than destroy. That gentleness is what we hear throughout the ample and beautiful margins of this book, the notes of its music being played with such care, and played softly, piano.”
—Fred Marchant Author of The Looking House (Graywolf Press, USA) and House on Water, House in Air (Dedalus Press)


ISBN 978 1 906614 41 6 Paperback
120 pp, 210 x 148 mm
April 2011

Additional information

Weight .15 kg
Dimensions 216 × 140 mm

Product Detail

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About The Author

Author

Eva Bourke, born in Germany in 1946 is a poet and translator. She has published six previous collections of poetry, Gonella (Salmon, 1985), Litany for the Pig (Salmon, 1990), Spring in Henry Street (Dedalus, 1996), Travels with Gandolpho (Dedalus, 2000), The Latitude of Naples (Dedalus, 2005) and piano (Dedalus, 2011). Her many translations include a selection of the poems of Elisabeth Borchers in English, as well as two comprehensive anthologies of Irish poetry in German, the most recent of which is Mit grüner Tinte / With Green Ink (1996). With Borbála Faragó she co-edited Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (2010) and, with Vincent Woods, Fermata: Writings Inspired by Music (2016). She has taught in Creative Writing programmes in the US and on the MA in Writing at NUI, Galway. Eva Bourke has received numerous awards and bursaries from the Arts Council and is a member of Aosdána. PERSONAL STATEMENT "I admire formal poetry but I’m drawn to free verse more for its natural, organic, holistic feeling encompassing the physical (voice, heartbeat) and the non-physical (insight). Poetry offers illumination and hope by giving us trustworthy language appealing directly to the intellect, the senses and above all the emotions." REVIEW EXCERPT "… rich, copiously descriptive poems (…) packed with astonishing images and detailed observation, this is a book to relish. Bourke’s prose poems tell fabulous stories …" — John McAuliffe on piano (The Irish Times)