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Through an Open Window
by Mary Lavery Carrig
Format: Hardback
Publication date: 2nd June, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-906018-95-5
Price: €15
Second poetry collection, beautifully presented in hardback, from Mary Lavery Carrig.
Praise for Rich Pickings from Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Poet
“I write to greet and chat with ghosts”, Mary Lavery Carrig tells us; “I write because it cuts a path through my darkness… I write to honour love”. Poetry, for her, is a medium to a place where magic happens. Magic happens as the particular becomes the universal; magic happens as the ordinary becomes the extra-ordinary: she can find the father, son and holy ghost in a leaf of cabbage.
Through An Open Window is a worthy successor to her first volume of poetry, expanding and developing themes first visited in the earlier collection and breaking into new ground. Like Saint Augustine, who she quotes, her “whole business in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart”. Like the widow in her eponymous poem, she brings us to a place where winter is gone. I welcome this volume and wish it all the success it deserves.
What Mary has to Say:
To a frequently posed question, I might respond by saying that I write to greet and chat with ghosts. I write to help me remember. I write to soothe my worries. I write for the sheer joy of it. I write because it cuts a path through my darkness. I write to honour love. I write when sleep is badly broken and I write as a witness to nightmares and to dreams.
I write too knowing that words spoken and written can stab and maybe even kill. Is it a lot like love then because to write carries its own risk? To find the words, to gather them and write them down, to rattle around at the source, to reveal how vulnerable we are…
Yet I take the risk because poetry is my medium to a place where magic happens, a place where life becomes remystified, sometimes strangely, transformed. Isn’t that the gamble?
It is I that runs the gauntlet of the gamble and I that have joy in the running. If you choose to read on, thank you.
Proceeds to Kerry Hospice.
