Geraldine Mills
An Urgency of Stars
ISBN:
9780905223537 paperback
9780905223605 hardback
Geraldine Mills’ third collection explores landscapes and inhabitants from Ancient Greece through Cape Cod to pre-and post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Here we meet ghosts with ‘a hollow of bones on walkabout’, a foxwoman who cries ‘guilt tears’ for leaving her children alone, graves washed out to sea. However, she does not surrender to a world of such stark truths. While her ‘bones know change the way birds know sky’, she chooses to inhabit a space where ‘it all comes down to light’.
‘Geraldine Mills’ poems hint at a life that holds its breath, not entirely at ease as it takes stock. Her patient, poetic language reveals to the reader a sense of belief in what are surely the cleansing fertilities of poetry. Refusing to ’celebrate’ for the sake of it, insisting on authentic process, this is serious work, created by a questing, refreshingly Irish imagination’.
– Mary O’Donnell
‘These quietly ambitious poems are replete with journeys at once literal and emblematic, and with observances so attentively and bracingly witnessed, they startle on the page with their lived immediacy and human resonance. That subtle, encompassing movement from sky to earth, from imagined expanse to blunt particular, bears further witness to her poems’ reliance on the lived detail, their un-showy but sharp intellectual play, their emotional resourcefulness’.
– Daniel Tobin