Heather Island - McBreen, Joan

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Résumé :
In this her fourth collection, Joan McBreen interrogates loss and completes a tentative journey of renewal. A quiet strength sustains the consistently elegiac mood of Heather Island. This poet of autumnal gloaming revisits the shapes and colors of Tully Lake and Mountain in Connemara, the 'browning bracken' and 'the late blackberries.' But McBreen also travels far beyond the comfort of the familiar, to South America, to Borges and Neruda, to the mysteries of passing time and death. There is a serenity and sense of liberation, in her poems of acceptance.

Sommaire:
Through their simple, plain-spoken respect for the ordinary forces of the landscape she loves - for its fauna and flora, its 'season of stillness' or its 'disconsolate cry of the lost' - the poems in Joan McBreen's quietly lyrical fourth collection compose a settlement for the heart, even a site for soul-pondering. In brief elegies and celebrations her poems address losses, local phenomena, familial transitions, fashioning language-moments of subdued rapture (bird wings 'the colour of opals') or sharply accented nostalgia (living away from Ireland, she writes that 'one seashell to hold close/ to my ear would do, / and rain on my face'). 'I sing my own song, ' she says in one poem, and in the best of these poems her notes ring sweet and clear, so even winter clouds can 'break, letting in such light.' Eamon Grenn...