Kirjahaku

Comedy and catechism clash in a 1950s convent school for girls.

The Magical Forest of Aliveness is a wonderfully wise story which equips the inner child with metaphors to open the way for awakening to one's true nature. It's a sweet, simple, and wise poetic journey into human awakening that calms the mind, warms the heart, and speaks directly to the soul. A marvelous tale about the "stuff no one ever told us," but that would have changed our lives if they had.

Imagine for a moment that you had no pressures in your life—no problems to fix, no deadlines to meet, no struggles to overcome. Do you feel that sense of spacious relief? It’s not an illusion, teaches Mary O’Malley. It really is possible to live with that profound openness all the time, even while tending to your everyday tasks and obligations. In What’s in the Way Is the Way, Mary offers practical guidance for meeting all of your experience with an abiding sense of ease, trust, and peace of mind. This accessible book is divided into ten phases, featuring inspiring wisdom and step-by-step exercises to heal the core beliefs that keep you stuck. With each chapter, Mary invites you to come into the present and see yourself and your circumstances in a different way—unclouded by preconceptions, struggle, or fear. Join her on this illuminating journey to discover: • How fear controls our lives—untangling the conditioning that keeps us from trusting our complete experience • The healing power of curiosity—a natural way to meet our lives without needing to change or judge anything • Trusting what happens even when we feel threatened, ashamed, or afraid • Why we become more active, engaged, and effective when we stop "doing" life and start being fully present for our lives • Remembering exercises—simple, powerful practices for reconnecting with our natural state of curiosity, trust and love "No object, person, or experience will ever bring you the deep and lasting peace that comes from simply being open to life," writes Mary. With What’s in the Way Is the Way, this renowned teacher brings you a powerful guide for turning your obstacles into your greatest allies and teachers—and showing up for your life with all your vulnerability, passion, and magnificent perfection.

Joint Winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2018. In Playing the Octopus, her eighth collection of poems, Mary O'Malley's sensitivity to the spirit of Ireland's west coast is as attuned as ever. In a world both earthen and dreamlike, bodily and mythical, a trout is seen to 'swallow light through his skin', a wolf 'howls the great open vowel of his need', and in the emptiness where a tree once stood, 'a tree-shaped brightness dances'. Over the course of the collection, O'Malley twins the Irish west coast with the American east coast, Inis Mor with Coney Island, the parish with the metropolis, the pipes with the axe, each offering its own comfort and wonder. Sylvia Plath, Lois Lane and Antigone feature in an unlikely cast of heroines through which O'Malley tests the mythologies of motherhood and femininity ('no mother is ever good enough until she's dead', writes the poet, with characteristic wit). Playing the Octopus is a body of writing buoyed by the redemptive power and sustaining joy of music, and it closes with O'Malley's translations of the Irish poet Sean O Riordain and the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca.

What is time? Our understanding of it changes, between when the angels rejoiced at the incarnation to when Einstein and then Feynman reconceived it. In the strange, unregulated and disorienting world of the web we experience it in new ways, its predictabilities wrested from us. In Mary O'Malley's Demeter and Persephone sequence, time is experienced through generations, but the new gods play differently and spin the clock hands in their own mischievous ways. New generations find the time-patterns and expectations of their predecessors arcane and incomprehensible, and vice versa. Through mythology and ecology, this book sets out to restore connections. The book opens with oranges orbiting a winter kitchen. Time in its dozen guises moves through the poems, as does fate. Mary O'Malley was appointed 2019 Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

The poems of The Shark Nursery respond to a disturbed world. The experience of lockdown, of lives lived in an online reality, and of the animal world are the interlocking parts of the poems' world. The animal poems draw on the tradition of animals in Irish poetry and myth. From the wolf's touch to the rat's tweet, animals and fish refuse the roles human beings impose on them. O'Malley's animals find new language in the face of contemporary perils. In fusing mythic with modern elements, The Shark Nursery is marked by rigorous attention to language and tone. Its poems weave between human, animal and metaphysical realms. In a space before noise begins, tigers visit cities and a white leopard sits on a lawn in Suburbia. In the strange, sealed off world portrayed in the 'The Ballad of Googletown' – an eerie, genuine ballad, where the familiar tropes and refrains of ballad are hung out to dry – lives are lived online and social interaction is unnecessary: The cars are in the drive And the bees are in the hive They say the kids are safe inside In Googletown This new book promises, as Joseph O'Connor has written, all those things 'we go to Mary O'Malley for: truthfulness, seriousness, playfulness, too, and then a particular sort of hesitating and hard-won wisdom, a pushback against nonsense or sentiment or fakery, the beauty of plain words placed in careful order, carefully – and always, the bliss of musicality.'

Valparaiso is a book of poems begun at sea on an Irish research ship on which Mary O'Malley was a resident poet. It is a book of searches and discoveries. As the scientists chart a course dictated by the demands of their own researches, as Ireland is careering from boom into bust, Mary O'Malley explores the science of going under and staying afloat. What are the effects of such transformations on the imagination? A key poem, 'Out', escapes from the creative lockdown that the Irish boomtime entailed. She returns to an altered place, and is herself changed by an odyssey that has taken her around the Atlantic and Europe to a kind of homecoming.

Mary O'Malley is a natural musician. Her poetry alludes to music – the music of Ireland, the Iberian peninsula, the America of jazz and spiritual – and shares forms with it. Music is spiritual and political at the same time. Her themes embrace the child colonised and the adult journey, Ireland and America and Southern Europe, a poetry exploring love, place, loss, and locating the poet's one true home in language. When her native Irish language is lost to her, finding that true home becomes a special kind of challenge. The Boning Hall is the first book of poems by Mary O'Malley to be published by Carcanet. It includes work drawn from her previous collections, Where the Rocks Float (1993), The Knife in the Wave (1997) and Asylum Road (2001), all published by Salmon Poetry.

The poems in Mary O'Malley's new collection focus on legal separation: of Northern from Southern Ireland, of written Irish from its original script, of husband from wife. The book explores a season in hell when the verities vanish, the love we live by dies, and the ramparts that shore up our existence are demolished. A marriage breaks down, children leave home, love itself is questioned. What is home now? Where is it? And how do we live when we cannot return? The personal is examined through the lens of the greater human chaos. This is a book about eviction, an examination of the nature of home that is both private and political, written out of a sense of the barbarism that threatens to overwhelm the deep song of Ireland. '[Mary O'Malley] is a true artist in sketching the beautiful, small details without which the essence of place, and the identity dependent on it, can be all too easily erased.' - Eavan Boland

Mapping the changes that have occurred in Irish literature over the past fifty years, this volume includes twenty-one writers, poets, and playwrights from the North and South of Ireland, who tell their own stories. They are funny, tragic, angry, philosophical, but all are vivid personal accounts of their experiences as women writing during a pivotal period in the history of Ireland. With a foreword by Martina Devlin, and an introduction by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, the anthology includes essays by Cherry Smyth, Mary Morrissy, Lia Mills, Moya Cannon, Aine Ní Ghlinn, Catherine Dunne, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Mary O’Donnell, Mary O’Malley, Ruth Carr, Evelyn Conlon, Anne Devlin, Ivy Bannister, Sophia Hillan, Medbh McGuckian, Mary Dorcey, Celia de Fréine, Máiríde Woods, Liz McManus, Mary Rose Callaghan, and Phyl Herbert.

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation In this radical anthology the work of three of Ireland's most important and best-loved contemporary poets is featured. Each has, in a different way, cleared new creative space to speak and to sing. The anthology makes an essential selection of some forty pages from the work of the poets. Each contributes a short personal statement, and there is a bibliography. Eavan Boland introduces the book with a major new essay. EAVAN BOLAND was born in Dublin in 1944. She studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She is Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. Her Carcanet books include Selected Poems, Collected Poems, The Lost Land, Code, and her prose book Object Lessons. PAULA MEEHAN was born in 1955 in Dublin. She studied at Trinity College and became a Writer Fellow of the English Department, and has taught in the United States. She has written plays and held a creative writing fellowship at University College, Dublin. She has worked with inner city communities and conducted workshops in prisons. Carcanet published Dharmakaya, her most recent book of poems, in 2000. The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994) were published by Gallery Press. MARY O'MALLEY, born in Galway in 1954, has travelled widely but returned to Ireland to become part of the Cuirt Festival committee. She is a member of the Poetry Council for Ireland. Her previous collections include Where the Rocks Float (1993), The Knife in the Wave (1997) and Asylum Road (2001) published by Salmon Poetry, and The Boning Hall (2002) published by Carcanet.