Like Joy In Season, Like Sorrow

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LIKE JOY IN SEASON, LIKE SORROW
Poems by MARY DORCEY - Temporarily Out of Stock

With this new volume, Mary Dorcey has become a necessary poetic voice. We have always looked to her to give witness to love among women but increasingly, she is needed for her unflinching cartography of old age; the shape-shifting relationships between aging parents, voyaging towards decline and death, and the children who care for them: 'This commonplace and /unreported suffering.' In a sustained meditation, Dorcey follows a mother's slow movement towards old age and loss of memory: �the erosion by stealth, of culture/and past.' With remarkable control she maps the moving shoreline between joy and pain, and resolves to: 'put it to service/grist to the mill/for your sake/for mine.' This poetry is, above all, a celebration of the power of memory in the face of its destruction. An act of reparation, by which Dorcey seeks to restore the past through a lyrical celebration of it.: 'eyes that caught/the light in such a way/ a sudden trick of shadow/seemed to unveil/ a window to the heart.' In a language, at once, elegant and sensual, these are poems of a rare emotional depth, exacting and profoundly moving, from a poet reaching her true authority.

About the Poet

The award winning short story writer, poet and novelist, Mary Dorcey was born in County Dublin, Ireland. In 1990 she won the Rooney Prize for Literature for her short story collection A Noise from the Woodshed. Her best selling novel Biography of Desire (Poolbeg) was published in September of 1997 to critical acclaim and reprinted three months later, and is now about to go into its third reprint. In 1990 she published a novella, 'Scarlet O�Hara' (1990) contained in the anthology In and Out of Time (Onlywomen Press). She has published three volumes of poetry: Kindling (Only Women Press, 1982), Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers (Salmon Poetry, 1991), The River That Carries Me (Salmon Poetry, 1995), and, this volume, Like Joy In Season, Like Sorrow (Salmon, 2001). She has been awarded three Art Council Bursaries for literature, in 1990 and 1995 and 1999. Her work is now taught on Irish Studies and Women's Studies courses in universities internationally. Several theses have been published on her work and numerous critical essays. Her stories and poems have been anthologized in more than one hundred collections. Her poetry is taught on both the Irish Junior Certificate English course and on the British O Level English curriculum. It has been performed on radio and television (R.T.E. and Channel 4.) It has also been dramatized for stage productions in Ireland, Britain and Australia in In the Pink (The Raving Beauties) and Sunny Side Plucked. For over fifteen years she has given talks and readings of her work at major art festivals and at universities and book shops throughout Ireland, Britain and Europe, and the United States. She has lived in The United States, England, France, Spain and Japan. She is at present a Research Associate at Trinity College Dublin. She is writer in residence at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies where she gives seminars in contemporary English literature and leads a creative writing workshop.

A Sample Poem from Like Joy In Season, Like Sorrow

Snow

You call to me

now,

across a ghost filled

continent.

I see your breath

whitening

the air.

You are calling

goodbye.

You are too far off

for me to hear

distinctly

but I see

that you are

waving -

your hand

raised.

You will stand

alone

on the granite step,

the sea

at your feet,

the door thrown

open behind you -

all the beloved dead

gathered

at your shoulder.

You will stand there

waving,

your hand raised,

waving goodbye -

until you have

gone

from sight

completely.

And even the tracks

in the snow,

that led

to your life,

have vanished

Reviews

"In her three important collections, Mary Dorcey commands an unsparing and musical perspective on the love between women, but also on the question of authority and inheritance, and therefore on the woman's identity within a society and how it shadows and inflects the very idea of poetry." Eavan Boland

"It is her style that ravishes. She writes in English but her language has the starkness and sensuality of her great compatriots who wrote in Irish. Her meandering repetitions give a liturgical flavour to her love poems (and most of these poems, even when about loss, are love poems) that is appropriate to Dorcey's pagan sense of the sacramentality of sex." Patricia Monaghan, Booklist

"One of Ireland's most accomplished short story writers, Dorcey has produced work, which is one of the few examples of gay love explored in Irish poetry." Waterstone's Guide to Irish Books

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About the Poet

Sample Poem

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Other Salmon books by Mary Dorcey:

Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers (Salmon Poetry, 1991)

The River That Carries Me (Salmon Poetry, 1995)