The wondrously abundant and generous spirit of Patricia Monaghan sits at the table with us in this achingly beautiful book to share the secrets of her heart: reverence, humility, and joy. What a gift this incomparable teacher, scholar, and poet has left us in this, her most powerful collection of poems.
Annie Finch
From ‘Invitatory: Lauds’ ...
The wondrously abundant and generous spirit of Patricia Monaghan sits at the table with us in this achingly beautiful book to share the secrets of her heart: reverence, humility, and joy. What a gift this incomparable teacher, scholar, and poet has left us in this, her most powerful collection of poems.
Annie Finch
From ‘Invitatory: Lauds’ to her concluding ‘Ways to Leave’, Monaghan’s verse cherishes the meditative choruses of nature. Written from within the shadow and wildness of wells, stone walls, garden sparrows, wild plum tangles and fulsome landscapes, Sanctuary’s liturgical structure holds close for the reader an unsentimental communion with the ordinary, and an inherent awe. Through Ireland and in the Driftless Area of the United States, the poet’s voice bubbles with silence and sound, feeding mythical and personal presences and voicing beautiful songs of ‘the in-between’ and the ‘Neither here-nor-there’.
Seamus Cashman
Patricia Monaghan was Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at De Paul University, Chicago. Her several Irish related works include, Irish Spirit: Pagan, Celtic, Christian, Global, an international collection of essays which she compiled and edited for Wolfhound Press in 2001. Her poetry collection Dancing with Chaos (SalmonPoetry, 2002) notably delights in the entanglements of the human and personal in poetry and science. Patricia was honored with a Pushcart Prize, the Paul Gruchow Nature Writing award, and the Friends of Literature award for poetry. She and her husband, Michael McDermott, founded The Black Earth Institute, a writers & artists think-tank whose current Fellows come from all over North America and Ireland, and she was vice-President of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology as well as a lecturer for the Women's theological Institute. Patricia died on 11 November 2012.
