We’re delighted to see Audrey Molloy‘s poem on the shortlist for this year’s An Post Irish Book Awards Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year.Congratulations to all the shortlisted poets:
‘A Legacy to Seven Men I’ve Loved’ – Audrey Molloy
‘Lullaby Before Leaving’ – Theodore Deppe
‘Table Two’ – Owen Gallagher
‘Vectors in Kabul’ – Mary O’Donnell
Read all the shortlisted poems for Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year on their website and then vote for your favourite.
Audrey Molloy’s poem, ‘A Legacy to Seven Men I’ve Loved’ which was originally published in The Weekend Australian is included in her recently published collection, The Blue Cocktail.
In cinematic clarity Audrey Molloy’s second collection probes ideas of home across her native Ireland and Australia where she now lives. The ‘pure sheen’ of a horse chestnut makes way for the ‘minty scent’ of gumtrees in her adopted home where plants are often not what they seem: ‘You are my ocean — / blue cocktail of salt and sediment — / but you are not my leaf.’ While exploring ‘a closer understanding of what it means / to be a woman’ she displays a constant consciousness of the body and its desires. One part memory, two parts love letter to the sea, with dashes of longing, sass, and a nip of melancholia, The Blue Cocktail is strange, sexy and intoxicating. In a dazzling variety of forms here are poems alert to imagination and alive to language itself. If The Important Things was a book of promise The Blue Cocktail demonstrates that guarantee has been honoured.
