The gift of Joan McBreen's poetry is her ability to distill the essence of a moment, and bring its unique insight as a flame to light the darkness of our understanding. She does this with an effortless elegance, a sure touch, and a lyric voice which is attuned to the inward echoes of the psyche. In an article in the Washington Review American poet Paul Genega has written of her work, "...one is struck by the lyrical magic of the language, the precision of the diction, the absolute rightness of each and every word. There is a simplicity and straight-forwardness to McBreen's poems, but it is the simplicity of a pleasing, inviting facade, behind which lie nuances of association, emotion and meaning." McBreen's poems "...have a haunting quality that lingers and beckons the reader to return to them. They are poems of place and home and moment, unmistakably connected to the concrete world, each drawn from some special recognition of an object or event that extends beyond the poet's life into our own. Kathleen Cain, The Bloomsbury Review

JOAN McBREEN is from Sligo; she now lives in Tuam, County Galway. Her poetry collections are The Wind Beyond the Wall (Story Line Press, Oregon, 1990; reprinted 1991) and A Walled Garden in Moylough (Story Line Press and Salmon Poetry, Galway, 1995). Her most recent collection, Winter in the Eye: New & Selected Poems, has just been published by Salmon (April 2003). In 1997 she was awarded an MA in Women's Studies by University College, Dublin, presenting A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Irish Women Poets as her dissertation. Her poetry is published widely in Ireland and abroad and has been broadcast, anthologised and translated into many languages. Her anthology The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan -- Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets was published by Salmon Poetry in 1999 (reprinted 2000, 2001).

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