In Entering the Mare, Katie Donovan leads us into a world both mythic and contemporary, where the female principle is raped, defiled, destroyed and devoured, only to rise again through the insistence of living folklore and the depth of the poet’s need to find and recreate the goddess in all her aspects: triumphant, cruel, passive, fertile and ever-resilient. The journey takes in a totemic clan from Macha, the horse goddess, to St Gobnait of Ballyvourney; from the poet’s own family forebears – including an Iroquois squaw – to a Tipperary woman who was burnt to death by her husband. These poems explore the hungers which haunt both our flesh and our fantasies, from the starvation of the Great Famine to the craving of a gambler for the next bet, from the heart’s longing for love to the jaded traveller’s need for pastures new. This new collection explores the conjunction of myth and the physical world of body and earth with urgent and memorable energy. Now out of print, most of this collection is now included in Katie Donovan's retrospective Rootling: New & Selected Poems (2010).
- ISBN13 9781852244293
- Publish Date 30 October 1997
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 5 August 2010
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Format Paperback (UK Trade)
- Pages 64
- Language English