This is a book of wonderings and wanderings. Many of the wanderings are on familiar territory explored on foot, the hills of Wicklow and of the Burren in Co. Clare, the shorelines of Dublin Bay, of North West Donegal, of Galway, Achill and the Aran Islands. Other poems bring us farther afield, to a French village on the banks of the Saône, to the Venetian Island of Torcello, to a sacred mountain lake in China. In these poems there is an alertness to the palimpsest of lives, human and non-human, lived in these places and the mystery of each individual life.

 

The poems bear witness to our primal kinship with the natural world, a source of nourishment, joy and solace, but also to our disastrous, onrushing human conquest of that same earth and seas. The poem ‘Bunting’s Honey’ is a tribute not only to those who composed and played early Irish harp music but also to those who collected the music and who, long after their own deaths, made possible a most remarkable renaissance of that same musical tradition. Similarly, ‘The Glance’, a meditation on Giovanni Bellini’s astonishing painting of a Madonna in the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, is a gasp of wonder at how tenderness and trepidation can be conveyed by pigment and brush across five centuries.

 

‘A Technology’ explores the quantum leap of literacy in allowing us, after so many millennia of human existence, to communicate details, not only of our outer lives, but also of our inner thoughts to those not immediately in our presence. ‘Girls Trained in Beautiful Writing’ considers the empowerments of literacy and the limitations imposed on that empowerment. There are other wonderings, not least the horrors of the wars of the twenty-first century, and the need to find a way to somehow set aside fear and difference and to give peace and tenderness a chance.