Nessa O'Mahony Livres

In Nessa O'Mahony's third poetry collection, she examines the nature of those bonds through poems that combine the autobiographical with the historical. Nessa presents a parallel sequences of poems, one relating to her relationship with her own father, whose decline and death she charts with painful honesty, the second exploring the life of her grandfather, a more mysterious figure whose story slowly emerges through her mother's memories, and her own research. The result is a meditation on love and losing, and on what is retained through narrative and memory.

Set against the backdrop of 1925 Galway, the story follows Detective Officer Michael Mackey as he navigates the challenges of his role in the newly-formed Special Branch. Tasked with uncovering subversives, he quickly finds himself entangled in a murder investigation, the recovery of stolen arms, and the quest to save a lost love, blending elements of suspense and personal stakes in a politically charged atmosphere.

Nessa O'Mahony's fifth volume of poetry explores many of her signature themes developed over a 20-year period. She writes with renewed urgency about life and love, continues her preoccupation with history (the hidden and overt), questions cultural identity and demonstrates her keen affinity with nature and landscape as well as exploring the liminal areas between loss and gain. At the heart of this new collection is a central sequence, the Hollow Woman poems, that explore O'Mahony's recent scrape with ovarian cancer, an experience that provoked profound questions about the essence of womanhood and female identity when faced with existential threat. But more than this is O'Mahony's enduring exploration of the human condition in a poetic voice that is quiet, subtle and occasionally devastating.