Description
This first collection of new poems in more than a decade by one of the senior and most admired figures in Irish writing contains both the wit and the fire, the apparent whimsy and the underlying deadly seriousness of a writer who has always refused the fashions of the time.
“…poems of Brechtian bite… of editorial impulse… and of more durable, stripped-down mystery… Indeed, Bardwell resists sentimental inceptions in even the gentler of these poems, as in ‘The Violets of the Poor’. Because Bardwell’s allusions and imagery insistently site her poems in discomfiting Irish realities, the more confessional of her poems properly end and begin in the mode of Blake… Recalling the startling outsider verse of Bardwell’s contemporary, Patrick Galvin, such lines remind us that Bardwell remains an outsider at home in Yeats’s Sligo – unnaturalised in EU Ireland.” — Thomas Dillon Redshaw, The Irish Times
“Honest and sparkling, Leland Bardwell’s poetry comes alive on the page with an enviable lightness of touch, and in the same stroke delivers a punch…” — Writing Notes
“…beautiful direct descriptions of the varied landscape of her home place…” — Sligo Champion
ISBN 9781904556442
74 pp, 140 x 216 mm
2006