Kirjahaku

Poetry collection from award-winning Irish poet and short story writer.

In this, her third short story collection, Geraldine Mills extends her thematic range to excavate new and shifting landscapes. Not afraid to tackle taboos, Hellkite occupies a space all of its own, where gender expectations are realigned to explore woman's inhumanity to man.

In a verse memoir, Mills follows the journey of her great-grandfather and his family from County Mayo, Ireland, to Warren, Rhode Island, in the late nineteenth century.

Geraldine Mills’ new collection, Bone Road in Word and Image, is a book length collection of lyric poems, combined with archival images from the US and Ireland, engaged with points where national and family history meet. Her imagination, like Emily Dickinson’s and Paul Celan’s, finds its most fertile ground in the smaller and tighter spaces that put the poet’s gifts under the most stress, and where diction, syntax, and technique must be at its most razor sharp. Mills’ short poems are brief narratives finely distilled, which engage with acts of erasure and suggestion that are central to the letter and the lyric. Each poem and image is a breath – of a human being, of a landscape, of hope, of return, of a diaspora–and is a moving, and beautifully crafted act of witness.

Geraldine Mills is one of the finest and most unique poets to have emerged in Ireland in recent decades. When the Light includes 124 poems selected from her previous poetry collections and her forty-year-long body of work, in addition to new poems completed in recent years.

'The Weight of Feathers' is a charming retelling of the Greek myth of Dedalus and Icarus which illustrates the danger of flying too close to the sun. The author mixes fantasy with a matter-of-fact tone, never faltering for a second, as she leads us on a surreal voyage into the half known.

The journey of Geraldine Mills into the world of the short story has earned her many plaudits, and it is clear from this collection, why. She shines a high definition light into the varied landscapes of her different characters, so that even her minor actors are presented to us in a very visual way and leave very strong imprints.This is no surprise, for readers more familiar with Geraldine's work as a poet. She brings lyricism to her prose, along with a keen sense of how the surreal crops up in everyday life. Here we meet Aunt Lillis who lets the birds peck food from her teeth, the good doctor who helps women "keep their hearts in one place," or Stella who has a penchant for young boys.Her heroes fight constant battles with jealousy, marital disappointment, infidelity and death. Though the themes are dark, they are not without humour. Some battles are won, others lost, all wholly engrossing. Taking the title from her Hennessy award-winning story "Lick of the Lizard," the prose in these nine highly-wrought stories sings, and the collection is a welcome addition to the Irish literary pantheon.

Esper and Starn are twin boys who live in a grim world that has been almost laid waste by massive volcanic explosions. Very little grows in Orchard, which used to be a fruit-growing area, but with the death of insects and birds, pollination of the fruit trees is a tedious and precarious undertaking. When the boys discover an intriguing old manuscript in a locked room in their apartment, which tells of gold on one of the forbidden islands the people can see from the coastline, they determine to go on gold-hunt. They manage to construct a glider that takes them far from their home territory, and so begins a whole new adventure for the boys, as they travel from island to island in search of gold. Their adventures are many and they come close to death. They do in the end, find the gold – but it is nothing like what they expected.