Sanctuary (Salmon Poetry) - Softcover

Monaghan, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908836512 ISBN 13: 9781908836519

Publisher: Salmon Poetry, 2013

Synopsis

Patricia Monaghan was Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at De Paul University, Chicago. Her several Irish related works include, Irish Spirit: Pagan, Celtic, Christian, Global, an international collection of essays which she compiled and edited for Wolfhound Press in 2001. Her poetry collection Dancing with Chaos (SalmonPoetry, 2002) notably delights in the entanglements of the human and personal in poetry and science. Patricia was honored with a Pushcart Prize, the Paul Gruchow Nature Writing award, and the Friends of Literature award for poetry. She and her husband, Michael McDermott, founded The Black Earth Institute, a writers & artists think-tank whose current Fellows come from all over North America and Ireland, and she was vice-President of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology as well as a lecturer for the Women's theological Institute. Patricia died on 11 November 2012. "Her great gift for sparkling visual description combine to make this book as refreshing and bone-deep satisfying as a draught of cold spring water."--Booklist, Dec. 1, 2013

About this title

Reviews

*Starred Review* A sanctuary is a place of refuge, also the part of a religious building in which the most sacred rituals are performed. The late Patricia Monaghan wasn’t the only poet who treated the natural world as refuge and temple. Wendell Berry comes to mind, also Robinson Jeffers, and, like them, she found refuge and worship in specific places, the west of Ireland and Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, to which the two parts of her final collection are, respectively, devoted. In both, the poems speak of flora and fauna, land and legends, while often carrying titles connoting the devotional aura of the entire book—“Invitatory: Lauds,” “Book of Hours,” “Confiteor: A Country Song,” “Transubstantiation.” That aura is not, despite the Catholic references of so many titles, primarily Christian but universalist and welcoming. Monaghan was a formalist poet, but one who never gave meter and rhyme the upper hand. Instead, she sought and achieved a lyrical and teaching voice, intent on focusing the reader on the overwhelmingly common but always numinous aspects of life: how all things are born, grow, decline, and die. Her avocation of gardening; her deep knowledge of indigenous folklore, Irish and Native American; and her great gift for sparkling visual description combine to make this book as refreshing and bone-deep satisfying as a draught of cold springwater. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Salmon Poetry
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908836512
• ISBN 13: 9781908836519
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88