Heather Island

In this, her fourth collection, Joan McBreen interrogates loss and completes a tentative journey of renewal. A quiet strength sustains the consistently elegiac mood of Heather Island. This poet of autumnal gloaming revisits the shapes and colors of Tully Lake and Mountain in Connemara, the `browning bracken' and `the late blackberries.' But McBreen also travels far beyond the comfort of the familiar, to South America, to Borges and Neruda, to the mysteries of passing time and death. There is a serenity and sense of liberation, in her poems of acceptance. "McBreen's vision is as clear as it is passionate. Her lyrics are delicately crafted with the result that the light that is cast always emerges to occupy the reader's field."-Irish Literary Supplement