Shearsman Books

Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610262

Forest Music is Susan Connolly's second full-length collection. It includes work from several chapbooks—Race to the Sea (1999), Ogham: Ancestors Remembered in Stone (2000), Winterlight (2002) and newer work published in journals such as Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, the SHOp, Shearsman, Southword, Crannóg and The Stony Thursday Book.

Many poems in this collection depict Susan Connolly's personal encounter with her landscape. Living in Drogheda, close to the Boyne Valley, her poems celebrate the famous archaeological monuments of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange alongside local landmarks: the Maiden Tower, the seawall at Baltray and the discovery in a back garden of a cobbled garden dating from the early nineteenth century.

Download a sampler PDF of work from this book.

"There is a lingering sense of some deep personal hurt in these poems, and an affirmation of the healing power of poetry, music and landscape. There is a revitalizing of place through the evocation of the legends attaching to wells and other landmarks, and to animals. 'One thousand autumn oak leaves' cuts to the lyrical quick. Its weaving of past, present and future into one coherent fabric has an incantatory power to enchant both writer and reader into an acceptance of life and all that happens." (Ciaran O'Driscoll, Poetry Ireland Review, 76, Spring/Summer 2003)

Her recent work is more experimental in form. These poems involve a typography in which the visual pattern corresponds in some way to the sense of the word or phrase represented. Dissatisfied with words always moving from left to right across the page, in these poems words can be vertical instead of horizontal, and move in circles and spirals as the need dictates.

A poem about an early Christian high cross adopts the shape of the cross. Another imitates a pair of wings. A word becomes abstract, its letters overlapping like a flower's petals. Writing a poem is like exploring a secret language:

          Ogham is climbed as a tree
                    is climbed,
      treading on the root of the tree first,
        with one's right hand before one
             and one's left hand last

                    Auricept na nÉces

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