A Quarter of an Hour

by Leanne O'Sullivan

Overview

In 2013, Leanne O’Sullivan’s husband Andrew suffered a severe infection in his brain. He spent just over three weeks in a coma, during which time his temperature soared to 42 degrees. When he finally woke it immediately became clear that his memory had been almost completely destroyed; he didn’t even know his wife. More present and visual to him were the birds and wild animals that he believed he could see during his recovery: foxes, wildcats and herons – animals that seemed to be guiding him back.

This became the starting point for poems that deal not simply with personal memory and recovery, but also the ways in which, collectively, even globally, we are trying (or not) to save entire species of plants and animals that we are now actually losing because of human activity. Nature has a voice that can speak back. This is a collection that celebrates the earth’s intoxicating wildness as well as the richness and preciousness of human experience. Overall, we can rejoice in the fact that we’re here, whatever the challenges.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780372235
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	59
File size:	208 KB

About the Author

Leanne O'Sullivan was born in 1983, and comes from the Beara peninsula in West Cork. She received an MA in English in 2006 from University College, Cork, where she now teaches. The winner of several of Ireland's poetry competitions in her early 20s (including the Seacat, Davoren Hanna and RTE Rattlebag Poetry Slam), she has published four collections, all from Bloodaxe, Waiting for My Clothes (2004), Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009), winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2010, The Mining Road (2013) and A Quarter of an Hour (2018). She was given the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2009 and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry in 2011, and received a UCC Alumni Award in 2012. Her work has been included in various anthologies, including Selina Guinness's The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) and Billy Collins's Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003). Residencies and festival readings have taken her to France, India, China and America, amongst other locations.

Table of Contents

I

The Cailleach to the Hero 12

The Fox 14

Lightning 16

The Watchman 17

Autumn 18

Tracheotomy 19

A Nativity 20

The Kitchen Maid 22

Lord 23

Prayer 24

Leaving Early 25

The Cailleach to the Widow 26

Oracle 27

The Lark Ascending 28

Waking 29

His Vision 30

II

The Cailleach to the Widow 32

Love, where are we now?… 33

Eumnestes 34

Morning Poem 36

When Words 37

The Garden 38

Labhraidh Loingseach 42

Mes Aynak 43

Dream 44

Ghost 45

David Copperfield 47

Meteor Shower 48

Thunder 50

Oisin 51

Anamnestes 52

Fox 54

The Cailleach to the Widow 55

Elegy for the Arctic 56

Note 57

III

The Cailleach to the Hero 61

Notes 63

Editorial Reviews

Leanne O’Sullivan is possessed of a haunting lyric voice which, in A Quarter of an Hour, draws us into an area of surface tension where personal crisis – a husband stricken and then recovering from a deadly illness – interacts with our experience of the non-human. Dawn, the poem that gives the book its particular title and focus, captures in its evocation of the dawning world the ‘here to not here’ of becoming; and as readers we are given access throughout to that dimension between the mundane and the mythic that normally eludes articulation, but here finds expression in limpid, precise poems. At once tender, exploratory and grace-filled, this finely orchestrated collection attests to the wholeness of natural life and, resonant with folkloric wisdom, it re-awakens the spirit to a fresh sense of the mystery and precariousness of our world. It is an astonishing achievement.' - Maurice Riordan, Judge of the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award

From the Publisher