Round the Mulberry Bush by Patricia McCarthy
'Like ‘fixtures patterning the air’ the accumulation of experiences here resonates far beyond the covers of the book and as oaks seem to listen to the unheard and ‘owls out-perform / flutes’ we become witnesses to an inner theatre. As Geoffrey Hill suggested it is small factual vision that leads to Gnostic awareness.'
– Ian Brinton
'Patricia McCarthy’s collection Round the Mulberry Bush is an intensely compassionate, intelligent and moving elegy to her loves and losses. Deeply personal, these poems will make you gasp at their unflinching honesty, and praise their universal truths, to which every reader can relate. McCarthy’s poems are a standard bearer for what is best in lyric poetry; her skill holds the power, always, to surprise and astonish. This is an important collection, by an accomplished poet.'
– Eleanor Hooker
'In Round the Mulberry Bush Patricia McCarthy takes the reader through the great cycles of life and death, gain and loss, revealing the unexpected knowledge and healing that can arise from both. The poems move against the backdrop of her dual allegiance to Ireland and England. The final sequence, ‘Coda’ draws all these themes together in a love that is celebratory, universal and redemptive in the face of mortality.'
– Hilary Davies
'Patricia McCarthy’s poems come to us as prized artifacts, rich in inventive metaphors, incantatory rhythms, tough consonance, and carefully crafted cohesion. What they hold is even more startling. Unusual, personal angles are taken, earlier selves are merged with other female voices, and she covers such universal themes as Hiroshima, a tsunami, D-Day, 9/11, focusing, too, on the enhancement of being half Irish, half English. The result is poems that are monuments to female survival – acting together as a tribute to the Everywoman of our times.'
– Belinda Cooke
Mick Imlah, on reading many of these poems, wrote ‘They are the most exciting poems I have seen for a long time’.
Waterloo Press
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