By Grace Wells

The Book of Life

The Book of Life: Poems to Tide You Over is a major new anthology, in an attractive pocket-book format, charts the journey of life from birth to death in poems drawn from almost 40 years of publications from one of Ireland’s most respected poetry imprints.

Description

The Book of Life: Poems to Tide You Over is a major new anthology, in an attractive pocket-book format, charts the journey of life from birth to death in poems drawn from almost 40 years of publications from one of Ireland’s most respected poetry imprints.

The best poetry is a form of spiritual autobiography – poems that stand as way-markers along a poet’s soul journey. Such poems tend to narrate a particular life-experience, but somehow in their telling they touch the soul of the reader. They remind us not so much of a shared experience but rather a shared knowing. They resonate with a mood or tone within ourselves that we instantly recognise as true.

Such potent writing is a rare thing, but the poems gathered here [drawn from the extensive range of Dedalus Press books in print] are such poems – way-markers and turning points along the journey of our becoming. Each one captures an important rite of passage, or the closure or beginning of a personal epoch. Though the experience may be unique to its author, the poems resonate with a far wider sense of soul knowledge …  It is not the voice of one particular poet that we come away with, but rather the collective voice of our shared humanity.

GRACE WELLS, from The Introduction

Includes poems by Leland Bardwell, Pat Boran, Paddy Bushe, Catherine Ann Cullen, Patrick Deeley, Katherine Duffy, Erin Fornoff, Francis Harvey, Ann Joyce, John Kelly, Paula Meehan, Gerry Murphy, Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Mary Noonan, Paul Perry, Mark Roper, Gerard Smyth, Mutsuo Takahashi, Ross Thompson, Jessica Traynor, Grace Wells, Joseph Woods, Enda Wyley and many more.

The Book of Life: Poems to Tide You Over
Edited by Grace Wells
170 x 105 Paperback, ISBN 9781915629074
203 x 127 Hardback, ISBN 9781915629067
11 November 2022
174 pp

See also: https://www.gracewellslittlesanctuary.com/

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About The Author

Author

GRACE WELLS was born in London in 1968, lived in Co Tipperary for many years and is now based in Ennistymon, Co. Clare. Nature, spirit of place and ecological concern have been large themes in her writing ever since the publication of her debut children’s novel Gyrfalcon (O’Brien Press, 2002), which won the Eilís Dillon Best Newcomer Award and was an International White Ravens Choice. Her debut poetry collection When God has been Called Away to Greater Things (Dedalus Press, 2010), won the Rupert and Eithne Strong Best First Collection Award, and was shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe New Poetry Award. With her second poetry collection Fur (Dedalus Press, 2015), Wells moved more deeply into eco-poetics and eco-feminism. Fur was lauded in Poetry Ireland Review as ‘a book that enlarges the possibilities of poetry’, and her poem Otter was Highly Commended by the Forward Prize. She has reviewed Irish poetry for a wide range of journals, and has taught and mentored emerging writers on behalf of Poetry Ireland, Words Ireland, and for many County Council Arts Offices. In 2018 Grace Wells moved to County Clare, which has informed her new work with a coastal, marine light. Many poems for her latest book, The Church of the Love of the World (May, 2022) are accompanied by eco-poetry-films to be found on her website www.gracewellslittlesanctuary.com. REVIEW EXCERPT “A poet of depth and elegance, of sparkling intuition and studied formality, Grace Wells is one of the twelve apostles at the feast of poetry. Her work will endure for its beautiful seriousness, its style, its sense of purpose” – Thomas McCarthy