"There are chapbooks, and there are chapbooks. And then there is Legion by Eleanor Hooker.
Letterset by hand, crafted in the old style, these 8 poems sing of honeybees and intone the "trembling water of the lake". Eleanor's work is evocative as always, teeming with the profusion of nature and its gifts and the people who interact with these, in good ways and bad. Echoes of Yeats's "bee-loud glade" come to mind, not just because of the theme but for the texture of the language too.
But Eleanor's words focus on the feminine, weaving images like spells cast over the page, words to harness the energy of the natural world that most of us don't understand but that lead the poet "to wheedle with words".
The honeybee with all its associations - productivity, sweet honey, its sting, the drone reproducing only to die - is a charming metaphor for the many dichotomies of life as well as the greed that abounds in society, where the bee-elect is "trapped in the syrup of its own success".
A beautiful artefact made by Hans van Eijk of Bonnefant Press, Maastricht, Holland, with frontispiece by Jeanie Tomanek."
Anamaría Crowe Serrano - poet and author
"There are chapbooks, and there are chapbooks. And then there is Legion by Eleanor Hooker.
Letterset by hand, crafted in the old style, these 8 poems sing of honeybees and intone the "trembling water of the lake". Eleanor's work is evocative as always, teeming with the profusion of nature and its gifts and the people who interact with these, in good ways and bad. Echoes of Yeats's "bee-loud glade" come to mind, not just because of the theme but for the texture of the language too.
But Eleanor's words focus on the feminine, weaving images like spells cast over the page, words to harness the energy of the natural world that most of us don't understand but that lead the poet "to wheedle with words".
The honeybee with all its associations - productivity, sweet honey, its sting, the drone reproducing only to die - is a charming metaphor for the many dichotomies of life as well as the greed that abounds in society, where the bee-elect is "trapped in the syrup of its own success".
A beautiful artefact made by Hans van Eijk of Bonnefant Press, Maastricht, Holland, with frontispiece by Jeanie Tomanek."
Anamaría Crowe Serrano - poet and author
My poem 'Through the Ears of a Fish' is shortlisted for the Listowel Writers Week, Irish Poem of the Year, in the An Post Irish Book Awards 2020. The competition was judged by Richard Skinner. Read More The poem was first published in the June 2020 issue of Poetry magazine.
Though sometimes it feels like it, none of us, wherever we are, are writing into the dark, someone is always listening... Thanks so much to Éamon Mag Uidhir for his truly wonderful review of Of Ochre
Ciaran O’Driscoll's thoughts on Of Ochre and Ash on his blog. Ciaran mentions Isabel Allende's novel The House of the Spirits is one of the novels on my PhD thesis proposal. Read More
Poet and author Amanda Bell and I chatted about my poetry and my new collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press) at Books Ireland. Thanks so much to editor Ruth McKee for making this happen. Read More