Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers

By: Mary Dorcey

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"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 ...

ISBN	1 903392 25 1
Pub Date	Monday, November 30, -0001
Cover Image	Reiltin Murphy
Page Count	102
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"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

"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

Mary Dorcey

Mary Dorcey is a critically acclaimed Irish poet, short story writer and novelist. She won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1990 for her short story collection A Noise from the Woodshed. Her poetry and fiction is researched and taught internationally at universities throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. The subject of countless academic critiques and theses, it has been anthologised in more than one hundred collections. She is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Academy of Writers and Artists and is a Research Associate at Trinity College where for many years she led seminars at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies. The first Irish woman in history to advocate for LGBT rights, she is a lifelong activist for gay and women’s rights. Founder member of ‘Irish Women United,’ ‘The Sexual Liberation Movement,’ and ‘Women for Radical Change.’ Her poetry is taught in schools at O-Level in Britain and on the Irish Junior Certificate. She has lived in England, the USA, France, Japan, Italy and Spain. She has published eight previous books: Kindling (Onlywomen Press, 1982); A Noise from the Woodshed (Onlywomen Press, 1987); Moving into the Space Cleared by our Mothers (Salmon Poetry, 1991); Scarlet O’Hara (Onlywomen Press, 1993); The River that Carries me (Salmon Poetry, 1995); Biography of Desire (Poolbeg, 1997); Like Joy in Season, like Sorrow (Salmon Poetry, 2001); and Perhaps the Heart is Constant after All (Salmon Poetry, 2012). She is currently completing a collection of novellas: The Good Father. She lives in Wicklow, Ireland.