Day of the Dead
Published on 26. September 2002
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-1-85224-592-4 (ISBN)
Description
From a surreal funeral vision in New Orleans to the many shades of love, these poems ferry the reader between the underworld and the light. Coming to terms with bereavement, the loss of love, betrayal and predation, Katie Donovan travels from personal stories to imagined realms, from the fate of an Indian outcast to a lover's treachery, from the lamprey grip of a heroin addict to the shooting of one cousin by another in the 1798 rebellion. Gradually talismans of death are turned inside out as the poet's path ascends to the living world, and a sequence of journeys. Invoking Brigid, the ancient Irish saint of poetry, protection and fertility, Donovan aims for the abundance of a new shore: getting lost in the snow on a Norwegian mountain, learning to water-ski in Greece, watching a healer in Brazil perform surgery without anaesthetic. The poems in Day of the Dead dance with the skeleton at the crossroads between the end and the beginning, the visceral physical world and the phantom parade of the past. Now out of print, most of this collection is now included in Katie Donovan's retrospective Rootling: New & Selected Poems (2010).
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Weight
134 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-592-4 (9781852245924)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Katie Donovan was educated at Trinity College Dublin and The University of California at Berkeley. She has published five books of poetry, all with Bloodaxe Books: Watermelon Man (1993), Entering the Mare (1997), Day of the Dead (2002), Rootling: New & Selected Poems (2010), and Off Duty (2016), which was shortlisted for the Irish Times-Poetry Now Award. Born in 1962, she spent her childhood on a farm in Co. Wexford before moving to Dun Laoghaire, a suburb of Dublin where she still lives. She has worked as a journalist with The Irish Times, a Creative Writing Teacher at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (in Dun Laoghaire), and currently teaches Creative Writing at NUI Maynooth. Her work has been widely anthologised, most recently in The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry, edited by Peggy O'Brien, and in Bloodaxe's Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley. She is the author of Irish Women Writers: Marginalised by Whom? (Raven Arts Press, 1988), and has co-edited two anthologies, Dublines (with Brendan Kennelly), published by Bloodaxe Books in 1996, and Ireland's Women: Writings Past and Present (with A. Norman Jeffares and Brendan Kennelly), published by Kyle Cathie (Britain) and Gill and Macmillan (Ireland) in 1994. In 2017 she was awarded the 21st Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry.