"A new book by Mary Dorcey is an event first to be celebrated, then to be reckoned with, for we can count on it to effect dramatic changes to our understanding of the way language is to be used and applied. These poems are the work of a canny and dextrous stylist. Readers of Mary Dorcey's fabulous short stories will here find many of the same rewards and challenges, but achieved through a language that is at once more lucid and more exacting: at any moment an unsuspected idiom (the book's title phrase, for instance) can spring arrestingly, and demand close attention and a response. Nearly every poem records an important human fact that has hitherto gone unspoken; nearly every poem both marks a past silence and opens a new possibility. This is a truly profound book, a remarkable and valuable achievement." Victor Luftig, Yale University

Praise for Mary Dorcey

"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

About the Author

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 four 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 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.

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