Paperback
Condition: As New
Mary O'Malley moves from the clear topography of her last collection, Where the Rocks Float, to probe the underwater world prefigured in her long poem sequence 'The Cave' from that collection. She does this by a process of inversion as 'The Seal Woman' struggles through her agonising journey from one element to another, entering the mythos to explore the nature of the poet's condition.There are poems of loss and of delight but this is above all a book written out of a fractured world: torn breath, the gap between languages, the rents in a poem. O'Malley never allows herself the luxury of false certainty but we glimpse occasionally the brilliance of the lost innocence she both regrets and celebrates.
Paperback
Condition: As New
Like the burgeoning sounds of morning from which Dawn Chorus takes its name, these poems emerge from the darkness of urban isolation into brilliant wilderness. More than half of the world's humans now live in cities, waking to the rhythm of artificial light, lulled by the hum of machines. We sense that some important part of us has atrophied but cannot name it. Dawn Chorus is a warning and a celebration. Pettway's lines remind us how deeply we harm ourselves when we turn away from nature and invite us to revel in the rediscovery of our wildest selves.
"The Alice Pettway of Dawn Chorus is an urban fabulist and pastoral realist--a modern-day Arcimboldo who rebuilds herself repeatedly in these poems, at the fulcrum between outworn civilization and fragile wilderness. Dawn Chorus is an escape from denial: it refuses to be cut off any longer. Even as the city shapes these poems, nature sings its way back to the foreground. Without merganser and yarrow, without a rebalancing, we're undone." --William Pierce, Coeditor, AGNI
"These poems allow us to inhale the aroma of Alaska's shores, its wild iris buds, the intricacy of each stone upon stone, and we can feel Pettway's interaction intensify with every moose skull, cottonwood tree, and merganser duck" -- Paul B. Roth, author of Moments in Place
"These beautiful poems will uplift you with their engaging story and their marvelous craft." -- John Morgan, author of The Hungers of the World: New and Selected Later Poems