In this third collection, Mary Madec returns to the real world of what it means to be herself, a woman of these times, exploring again the territories of the heart. She presents a partly imagined trajectory, extending beyond the present and deep into the past, reaching into the experiences of silence and calling out the ‘voices.’ Her poems are compassionate and courageous, sensual and sometimes visceral meditations on the injured or aging body, the broken heart, the reality of our ineluctably transient lives, and all the attendant grief. And yet there are light touches of redeeming humor, and always the Little White Egret of hope canceling out the darkness. Her language is rich and precise, sensitive to how it must map the tangles of mind and heart in this poetic project, which asks the poet to tell us what it is we are made of, what it is that makes it possible for us to walk on this earth and be sufficient to ourselves.
1
The Egret Lands with News from Other Parts 11
Redaction in the Inlet 12
The Burden of History 13
Civil War 14
This is the Place We Enter the River 15
The Pink Dancing Costume 16
Primer 17
Imagine 18
2
The Green Room 21
First Reading 23
For Every Tatter in Her Mortal Dress 24
Her Time Has Come to Go Under the Bridge 25
Subject 26
My Empty Nest 28
3
The Past Still Barks at Me 31
The Window 32
Fragile 33
Bangs 34
For Something to Say 35
Three Decades Between Myself and the Old Curmudgeon 36
Prospect Lane 37
Walking with a Six-Year-Old in the Woods 38
Mating Mallards 39
I Dream of a Bull Huss 40
4
Birthdays 43
Auguries 44
Beetle 45
Steering Wheel 46
About a Heart and Its Ancestry 48
Cabbage Butterfly 49
Rearview Mirror 50
Winter Storm at Coole 51
The Pursuit of Happiness 52
The Night I Met Jesus on a Dublin Bus 53
5
Moment of Reckoning 57
In the Beginning 58
Twins, Still 59
The Square in Front of the Archangels 60
Angel 61
6
Chambers’ Ice Cream 65
Penelope 67
Look at the Flowers of the Field 69
Grief is a Thing with Feathers 70
No, I Cannot Go Home, I Don't Know What to Say to the Children 71
I Think My Breasts Sing 72
The Hammam 73
Looking Like Rain 74
À Plus 75
She Lives Everyday as if it Were Her First 76
As She Died 77
Family Funeral 79
Kylemore Abbey – A Valediction Forbidding Mourning 80
Amphitrite at Achill Head 81
Egrets on the Flaggy Shore 82
Acknowledgments 84
About the author 86
