Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories: illuminating, moving, arrows in flight.
Mary Lavin’s stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life.
From rural Ireland and the streets of Dublin they charm, irritate and intrigue in complicated brilliance, appearing to us with unique freshness. Good friendships, bad deeds, frustrations, missteps, hope and laughter are all found in captivating stories where real and astonishing things happen. Few women were so consistently published in the New Yorker and yet today Lavin’s work is largely unpublished and overlooked.
This collection re-establishes her as one of the most genius, irresistible and memorable voices of the last century.
‘This is a wonderful collection, and a reminder that Mary Lavin was – is – one of Ireland’s greatest writers’ Roddy Doyle
ISBN 9781529956481
In polishing the evidence, Cecilia McGovern returns in many poems to her roots, as a child involved in the seasonal grind of farm work in Mayo. This closeness to earth is a reminder of the struggle for survival of previous generations, a struggle never referred to directly by anybody, that results for her in an ambivalent relationship with the landscape, reflected in the lines "Close as I'll ever be to saying/ "Go raibh maith agat a Mhaigh Eo". (Dark Interiors). The reticence about the past includes and is partly a consequence of the loss of the Irish language, which only survives in random, mostly angry, expressions of feeling. (The Coothrements). This reticence is an obstacle that must be overcome in order to establish the poet's entitlement to speak about the complexity of relationships, past and present.
 
 
These Salmon Poetry books have come into us unused and unopened but due to the storage in their last location they might have some scuffs or marks on the edges of the pages