Cirrus@Austlit

'A life lived with melancholy, its spikes, its other rhythms, its insistence. In the end, when we learn this part of us is part of us, is not our enemy, when we live long enough to eschew fear of judgments — social, medical, personal — eschew the idea of ‘normal’ and the label of ‘well’, what can these undercurrents of sadness teach us.

'These lyric poems, written over a decade, don’t attempt answers. They emerge from observation, reflection and re-imagining, from the desire to make peace with the self, beloveds, the past. In doing so, they ask if there are other emergent possibilities – patience, acceptance, gratitude, compassion, courage, hope – when we live with sadness that will not be banished, sadness that for the narrator of these poems is as inescapable as the earth on which she stands or the air she breathes.' (Publication summary)

'For Orla, living in the suburbs in 1968 on the cusp of adolescence, her father is a great shining light, whose warm and powerful presence fills her world.
'But in the aftermath of his sudden death, Orla, her mother and her sister are left in a no-man’s-land, a place where the rights and protections of the nuclear family suddenly and mysteriously no longer apply, and where the path between girl and woman must be navigated alone.'  (Publication summary)

'I suspect Fay would wave her hand and say she doesn’t like all this fuss. If she did say that, I’m not sure it would be all she felt about it.' (Introduction)