Geraldine Mitchell

The poems in Naming Love celebrate birds and weeds and the changing of the seasons. They lament loss of people and loss of nature. They track the changing of the seasons and notice the little things in the everyday and make them marvellous. Elegiac, unflinching, tender, Geraldine Mitchell’s poems are luminous refuge enlivened by responsibility to difficulty and to undistorted report. Mitchell’s voice is both coastal and worldly, deeply engrained with locality at the edge of Ireland, and shows we must share together, make sense together. These poems will enrich the reader with their seeming ease, their timbres, their opening onto new, fresh knowledge of a world to which the reader, too, is given intimate presence.

This is the fourth collection from Geraldine Mitchell, a Dublin-born writer who won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for poetry. Her poems offer both a timely warning that the planet is mortal and a reassuring reminder of life’s cyclical nature. These poems are a stunning sketch of a world that is a place of great beauty and great challenge.

Primary and secondary teachers who experience difficult behaviour from young children in their classrooms will welcome this handbook which encourages an objective approach to tackling behaviour problems.

In this, her third collection, Geraldine Mitchell's words spring from a landscape sculpted by harsh Atlantic weather which infiltrates, informs and ultimately illuminates every aspect of her poetry. We embark on a voyage through memory loss, its isolating silence and, ultimately, death. All the while, like a chorus in the unfolding drama, the poet's landscape is present with its constants of wind, rain, sea, mountains and, from time to time, a redemptive glimpse of sun.

In Geraldine Mitchell's new collection, poems call and respond across the pages, giving the reader a sense of exploration and discovery, of entering a world where reality is faced but consolation is offered. For all its darker moments, Of Birds and Bones has a lightless of touch. Tenderness and humour counterbalance an unblinking contemplation of human frailty in an uncertain world.

Primary and secondary teachers who experience difficult behaviour from young children in their classrooms will welcome this handbook which encourages an objective approach to tackling behaviour problems.