In 2017, the presence of a mass grave was confirmed in a disused sewage system in Tuam, County Galway. In it were the bodies of infants from the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, where from 1925 to 1961 the children of unmarried women were sent. The Speculations of Country People reckons with this harrowing discovery. Majella Kelly traces the journeys of women today, from controlling relationships to sexual reawakening. Gossip and Irish mythos, pagan and Christian, truth and legend - all blend and blur. Here are hares and selkies; here is a retired stuntman, dragging his bed of rusty nails along the beach. And here - quiet, against the beauty and loneliness of the Connemara landscape - are the little bones that wash up on shores to speak of what has been.
Majella Kelly is an award winning writer from County Galway. Her debut pamphlet Hush was published by Ignition Press and in the Brotherton Prize Anthology at the University of Leeds. In 2019 she won the Strokestown International Poetry Competition. In 2018 she won the Ambit Poetry Prize and came second in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize.
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