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The Boning Hall

New and Selected Poems

Mary O'Malley

Cover Picture of The Boning Hall
10% off Paperback
Categories: 21st Century, Christianity, Irish, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Hardback (116 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2002)
9781857546279
Out of Stock
Paperback (120 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2002)
9781857545982
£9.99 £8.99
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Pink rain, a flock of waders turn in the sun
    and there is nothing but the space between
    dimensions, a luminous choreography
    of the birds absence; a trick that
    no matter how often we see it calls back
    the ghosts of faith and wonder, to disappear again
    perfectly rehearsed, like a shoal of mackerel
    making their iridescent bellies dark.


    from 'Bowbend'

    Mary O'Malley is a natural musician. Her poetry alludes to music – the music of Ireland, the Iberian peninsula, the America of jazz and spiritual – and shares forms with it. Music is spiritual and political at the same time. Her themes embrace the child colonised and the adult journey, Ireland and America and Southern Europe, a poetry exploring love, place, loss, and locating the poet's one true home in language. When her native Irish language is lost to her, finding that true home becomes a special kind of challenge.

    The Boning Hall is the first book of poems by Mary O'Malley to be published by Carcanet. It includes work drawn from her previous collections, Where the Rocks Float (1993), The Knife in the Wave (1997) and Asylum Road (2001), all published by Salmon Poetry.
    Mary O'Malley was born in Connemara in Ireland and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at Universidade Nova. She served on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cúirt International Poetry Festival for eight years. She was the ... read more
    Awards won by Mary O'Malley Joint winner, 2018 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award
    (Playing the Octopus)
    Praise for Mary O'Malley 'There are many memorable poems in The Shark Nursery, a book that speaks eloquently to our place in the natural world as well as to the challenges posed by the current political landscape. Overall, it is a rich and stimulating collection that cements O'Malley's reputation as one of Ireland's most important contemporary poets.
    Tim Murphy, The Friday Poem
    'The Shark Nursery brings a fine lyric sensibility to subjects as diverse as Greek mythology, marine biology and the time/space continuum. ... Other poems push all the way into a lyrical surrealism rare in Irish poetry, harnessing metaphor's capacity to rough up our sense of the world as fixed and predictable.'
    Vona Groarke, The Irish Times
      'Gaudent Angeli is a significant addition to the opus of a poet serious about her art... O'Malley excels when she combines the high with the low, such as in 'Little Dazzler' which manages to include Odysseus, a sorceress, condoms, smartphones, and a "supermodel in a green tube dress".'
    Kevin Higgins, Galway Advertiser
    'very fine and hugely varied collection of poetry'
    Colette Sheridan, Irish Examiner
    'O'Malley is a true artist in sketching the beautiful, small details without which the essence of place, and the identity dependent on it, can be all too easily erased.'
    Eavan Boland
    'This new collection by one of Ireland's most respected and radical poets is as exhilarating a read as the title promises. Sampling through levels of irony from the neolithic to the neon lights of the lonely cities, from east to west, and indeed the hackneyed wesht (with a characteristically wicked eye), O'Malley offers us lyrics of the salvific quotidian woven together with the surreal elements of surviving our island paradoxes. Insouciant as the pirate queen Grace O'Malley who downfaced Elizabeth the First, Mary O'Malley steps into a zone of power and mastery with these new poems.'
    Paula Meehan
    'Mary O'Malley's seascapes [...] are suffused with such beauty and sonorous mystery and rhythmic care that they lift us above ourselves and the time we inhabit.'
    Colm Tóibín, Irish Times, 8th December 2012
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