A collection of skillfully crafted, imaginative, and moving poetry by an award-winning and widely published poet. As Eavan Boland writes: "The poems here have an exact and hard-earned lyricism...a difficult music that comes from experience rather than from any rhythmic holiday from it."

Caravan

Literature & Fiction

McKiernan, Ethna

Poetry

Midwest Villages & Voices Pubn

Light rubbing wear to red papers covers, else fine

Caravan (Poems)

The Dedalus Press

The poet's exacting sense of metaphor allows her to transform such particulars into universal experiences of pleasure and pain without ever becoming vague or abstract. A fine book from a maturing poet.""-Booklist                      ""Ethna McKiernan stands out among the ranks of poets for her ability to match language to subject, sound to sense. When this combination comes into play, readers come away refreshed and drawn deeper into life.""-The Bloomsbury Review

The One Who Swears You Can't Start Over (Salmon Poetry,)

Salmon Poetry

Ethna McKiernan's Sky Thick With Fireflies is laced and bound by memory. These poems hold the past to light and insist upon remembrance. Included are moving elegies for her father, for a friend's son, for the dead of 9/11, for her own child lost to adoption, and for the homeless population with whom she works. McKiernan's language of the ordinary is charged with the pervasive sense of compassion that governs this book.

Sky Thick With Fireflies (Salmon Poetry)

McKiernan's fourth collection returns to her earlier themes of loss --of her youngest son, of her father, and of the pervasive losses of the homeless population with whom she works. This new collection also addresses political wounds of a bygone America--the bombings of schoolgirls in Alabama the 1960's and the racially charged beating of Rodney King in the 1990's-as it presents poems that address the conflicts of today. Interspersed are poems of love, praise and joy. Ethna McKiernan has been twice awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board grant in poetry. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson Program for Writers. In an earlier life, she was CEO of Irish Books and Media.

Swimming With Shadows (Salmon Poetry)

Light Rolling Slowly Backward is Ethna McKiernan’s fifth and most ambitious collection of poetry. McKiernan, who has a gift for metaphor, gives us 120 poems in her latest volume, a third of which are new. Her work, which some critics have compared to Mary Oliver and Adrienne Rich, ranges from the hilarious (police arrest her girl scout troup of 13-year olds prancing in nighties at midnight on a Chicago street) to an elegy for George Floyd (where she tosses a “grenade of grief up to the sky”), to “The Radiation Room” where she compares the light beams sweeping her body for cancer to the reassuring twinkle of winter constellations overhead and “everyone she’s ever loved.”McKiernan pivots from sorrow and illness to natural beauty in “Light,” where “Two birches wear the white sheen of it” and then again to “Lewy Bodies,” where she explores the territory “near the cliff that separates the upright from the fallen.” Beneath her unflinching realism lies an affirming flame, which makes this collection unique. Like the poet Rumi, she knows that “the wound is where the light is.”"The poems here have an exact and hard-earned lyricism...a difficult music which comes from experience rather than from any rhythmic holiday from it." - Eavan Boland"McKiernan's vision is unsparing. She casts a cold eye which of course has the paradoxical effect in art of heartening us, of strangely warming us with the chill of truth." -Rory Brennan, Books Ireland"In these poems McKiernan draws everyday experiences with sure craft and fluid music. Her voice is one of empathy and honesty, and creates a kind of truth that only perfectly chosen words can tell." - Susan Roney O'Brien, Poet

Light Rolling Slowly Backward: New & Selected Poems

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