Memorizing the Wind

Deirdre O'Connor's poems are manifestations: focused intentions to "call in" the spirit from the world. She renders herself vulnerable, permeable to the mysterious depths that can assume the form of County Galway, a drawer in Pittsburgh, a grave, a mind, a bedroom, a mysterious hole, "this great unmasked sensation that we're all on the edge together." These poems are odes to remembering and forgetting, to inside and out, "to those who now speak only through us," to language. She's a domestic mystic, like Dickinson, she has visions, visitations, sometimes in the form of spirit animals, sometimes in the form of the night. What emerges is the thickness of the present, a new appreciation of our bonds.

     -Bruce Smith, Hungry Ghost

Deirdre O'Connor's Memorizing the Wind is an exquisite distillation of grief, resilience, and the harrowed love that endures. O'Connor reckons loss with wry wit, and steely understatement. In one poem, the father, developing dementia, "forgets to be mean." In another, the speaker says, "Praise the ones who loved us best they could" and thanks them "for toughening us." In poems struck by austere lyric restraint, the poet travels the forever-mysteries of the past, muses on its reconstruction as at last "a place to lie down in," wrapped in a beauty "threaded with silver, maybe gold." Memorizing the Wind edges into the sublime.

     -Cynthia Hogue, instead, it is dark

Odes, nocturnes, aubades-if Keats were still here, he'd want to have a conversation and a glass of claret with Deirdre O'Connor. These are gorgeous poems but not pretty poems. There's a fidelity to the often messy world, a fidelity to the messy truth that gives this book a rare, clear strength gracefully, even delicately applied. From the first lines "What wind is this,/ turning the pear tree's blossoms/ to loose-leaf snow?/ What wind, pushing/ the semen scent through town," we see that this will be an unusual collection, one that weds the best impulses of the Romantics with the earthy, complicated, mucky "semen scented" world. What holds the book together even as it raises the stakes of the poems is the gorgeous music of the language. 

 -Leslie Harrison, author of Reck