Wow! eBook
Valparaiso
Author(s): Mary O'Malley (Author)
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication Date: 31 May 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 88 pages
- ISBN-10: 1847771351
- ISBN-13: 9781847771353
Book Description
In 2007 Mary O’Mallet made a voyage on the Irish marine research ship the Celtic Explorer. It took her far out into the Atlantic, and it returned her to a self and a country made stange. Valparaiso, a collection begun at sea, is a book of searches and discoveries, plumbing oceanic depths and returning to a shore that ‘marks the start of possibility’. The surge and swell of the sea and sounds in it, a place of wonders where the imagination is freed. ‘ What would sing in me is the deep ocean’. As the scientists chart a coourse dictated by the demands of research, as Ireland is careering from boom into bust, Mary O’Malley explores the science of going under and staying afloat. She returns to an altered place, and is herself changed by an odyssey that has taken her around the Atlantic and Europe into her past and back to a kind of homecoming.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘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 Toibin, Irish Times, 8th December 2012
About the Author
Mary O’Malley was born in Connemara in 1954 and educated at University College, Galway. She travels and lectures widely in Europe and America, has written for both radio and television and is a frequent broadcaster. Her poems have been translated into several languages. She is a member of Aosdana and the Poetry Council for Ireland. She teaches on the MA in Writing at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
