In this third collection, Mary Madec returns to the real world of what it means to be herself, a woman of these times, exploring again the territories of the heart. She presents a partly imagined trajectory, extending beyond the present and deep into the past, reaching into the experiences of silence and calling out the ‘voices.’ Her poems are compassionate and courageous, sensual and sometimes visceral meditations on the injured or ageing body, the broken heart, the reality of our ineluctably transient lives, and all the attendant grief. And yet there are light touches of redeeming humour, and always the Little White Egret of hope cancelling out the darkness. Her language is rich and precise, sensitive to how it must map the tangles of mind and heart in this poetic project, which asks the poet to tell us what it is we are made of, what it is that makes it possible for us to walk on this earth and be sufficient to ourselves.
“The book is extraordinary, celebrating the, ‘crazy mystery of good agony,’ in a solemn mixture of the banal and the prophetic; these are poems about poems and poets, birds and the bible, war and married life, children and childhood, insects and parents. Deeply rooted in Irish myth they explore female territories explicitly, culminating in moving dirges for the mother figure”.
Medbh McGuckian
