Martina Dalton’s patiently assembled first collection, Midnight at the Saltmarsh, opens with a poem that recounts a story laden with mystery. Other poems swerve between the record of experience — there’s a ‘woman / wearing make-up // on only one side of her face’, a poem recording the shock of new birth (‘The Cord’) and another the last day outing with her father, the day she hoped ‘the sun could do without its sunset’. The title poem invokes the wisdom of Rilke.
Economical lines display finely observed details: a kingfisher ‘igniting / twig on twig’, a walking stick (her father’s?) whose ‘shadow casts its question mark’ and a kestrel ‘hanging from the sky by a thread’. The book culminates in a series of poems set in The Black Valley of County Kerry in which the author confronts her isolation. In poems of loss and healing Midnight at the Saltmarsh bravely reveals a woman’s lived life, her needs, longings and satisfactions.
Additional information
| Weight | N/A |
|---|---|
| Choose Type | Hardback, Paperback |
Preview
Reviews
“So much easier looking back”, Martina Dalton notes in her debut, Midnight at the Saltmarsh (Gallery Press, €12.95pb, €19.50hb), but the backwards glance isn’t quite as simple as that might make it sound. This is a book in which loneliness and the fine margins that separate human connection can, at times, become impassable gulfs — it’s a book of boundaries, some more porous than others, whether in the landscape or the rupture of present and past.
Memory can play tricks, on the eye and the mind, while time here is mutable, plastic, unreliable, whether “the street light/makes the shadow of the woman/look like a little girl” or “the drum roll of the cattle grid,/turned the clock back to zero./I set the rearview mirror//and watched your life grow smaller”.
Dalton builds a litany of sorts, itemising the objects and places of a life lived and lives gone, whether through the removal of time or the grander, more permanent, removals, and through this apparently straightforward method of a kind of natural symbology: “Everything here is a reflection/of something else – /waiting for sun to break through”.
There are other splits here, too, between the imagined and the real – both as seemingly valid, or at least embodied, as the other, just as every connection feels like a form of mortal risk, the close attention paid becomes a form of salvation, or preservative, to counter the feeling of being always on the brink of extinction: “she would never again//get to see it, her house/in the valley —//would have to rely/on memory then,/and the notes she had kept”.
These are poems as evidence and witness, “I show you these things/because I cannot show you the others”, and the obsessive, circling returns come to form a stay against erasure, a means of trying to hang on to things one must leave but can’t leave lightly.
— Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
Book Information
Publication date: 7 May 2026
Details: 64pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91737 126 1
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91737 127 8
Cover: ‘Incoming Tide, Achill’ by Paul Henry, © Sotheby’s. All rights reserved.
Author photograph by John Dalton
Customer Satisfaction
Customer Service
We’re happy to help. Send your queries to books@gallerypress.com
Shipping
Secure Checkout
Fast, encrypted and secure payments for a worry-free checkout.