The journey of Eva Bourke’s eighth collection of poems is one of bereavement, heartbreak and, ultimately, renewal.
In poems that record – with courage and tenderness – the loss of loved ones, of close family and friends, there is throughout a refusal to soften the keen gaze and precise detail for which her work is so often praised, as if the poet’s role is ever to be witness, guardian and curator. Instead of heartbreak enforcing a retreat from the world, rather it seems to strengthen her commitment to those in danger (“the boats adrift in the night / and the storms that sweep them overboard” — ‘Twenty-eight Swimmers’) and her belief in the power of art and music as both consolation and celebration, an engagement that has been the heart of her work over many years.
As she says in ‘The Singer’s Fable’, in memory of Mary McPartlan: “Sing, even if your hearts are heavy, even if your houses are on fire, rise up and sing.”
The idea of place runs like a river through the life and works of the poet and playwright W.B. Yeats. This book focuses on his time in Dublin, London, Sligo and elsewhere in the west of Ireland, embracing the homes, landscapes and people that impacted his life and stimulated his vast body of work.
Meet the poet’s father, the struggling artist John Butler Yeats; his mother Susan, the well-to-do Sligo girl who had no choice but to follow her husband’s path; his five siblings: Lily and Lolly, guiding lights in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement; Jack, the renowned painter; and Bobbie and Jane Grace, who died in infancy. Meet William Morris, John O’Leary, Katharine Tynan, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, George Hyde-Lees, and, of course, Maud Gonne, as well as countless others who helped weave the cloth of Yeats’s poetic gift.