From a surreal funeral vision in New Orleans to the many shades of love, these poems ferry the reader between the underworld and the light. Coming to terms with bereavement, the loss of love, betrayal and predation, Katie Donovan travels from personal stories to imagined realms, from the fate of an Indian outcast to a lover’s treachery, from the lamprey grip of a heroin addict to the shooting of one cousin by another in the 1798 rebellion. Gradually talismans of death are turned inside out as the poet’s path ascends to the living world, and a sequence of journeys. Invoking Brigid, the ancient Irish saint of poetry, protection and fertility, Donovan aims for the abundance of a new shore: getting lost in the snow on a Norwegian mountain, learning to water-ski in Greece, watching a healer in Brazil perform surgery without anaesthetic. The poems in Day of the Dead dance with the skeleton at the crossroads between the end and the beginning, the visceral physical world and the phantom parade of the past. Now out of print, most of this collection is now included in Katie Donovan's retrospective Rootling: New & Selected Poems (2010).
- ISBN13 9781852245924
- Publish Date 26 September 2002
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 5 August 2010
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 80
- Language English