Preparing for Spring by Nell Regan. Arlen House, 2007.

Description:  

A stingingly clear outdoor light illuminates Nell Regan’s poems. She offers her readers the sweet shock of immediacy: of the `glimmer of white butterflies, of the worn pieces of glass on the sea’s edge `muting clear to milky white', of the smell of fresh copybooks or empty tea-chests, of the `sweet rasp of sound'. Such moments of percepion are not decoration, they clarify a lived life. Here are poems which explore trauma, the fissures that open between present and past, 'the black hole in memory' . Her vision is precise and forgiving; the ways in which he past lives on and intersects with the sudden turns of the present, the freshness of landscape and urban streetscape. Her debut collection, Preparing for Spring, is an accomplished book which will delight both those readers who have already admired her work in magazines and those to whom her voice is new.

~ Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Condition: New paperback