LAUNCH: Geraldine Mitchell & Theodore Deppe
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We are delighted to welcome Geraldine Mitchell and Theodore Deppe to Books Upstairs for the launch of their collections, Naming Love and Impossible Blackbird respectively. Please join us to celebrate these remarkable new poetry collections with guest speaker Jane Clarke on Sunday 19th May at 1pm – all are welcome.
PRAISE FOR NAMING LOVE:
In Geraldine Mitchell’s stunning new book, Naming Love, the opening three lines sound a fanfare:
a blackbird knaps
the flint of my heart,
sparks fly
The surfaces of Mitchell’s poems are like a “whistling / soughing, simmering // summer garden,” alive with presences from nature that invite us into a world that feels both familiar and strange. Inside all this music, there is a profound silence; mysteries resonate, unspoken, at the heart of these poems. This is a book of marvels.
– Theodore Deppe
Naming Love is a collection that sings of love and mystery and the unknown as well as of solitude and loneliness and the quiet hours of reckoning. It’s a collection that loves the world through awestruck observation. It celebrates birds and weeds and the changing of the seasons. It laments loss of people and loss of nature. It tracks the changing of the seasons. It notices the little things in the everyday and makes them marvellous.
– Jane Clarke
Elegiac, unflinching, tender, Geraldine Mitchell’s poems in Naming Love are distinctly celebratory. Here are poems of luminous refuge enlivened by responsibility to difficulty and to undistorted report. Mitchell excels in expanding and calibrating a lexicon of the poetic through personal, situated use; words into phrases, phrases into poems, tuning poems across each other to detonate at cellular level, awaken a granular power; micro-poems built of just a few words which unfold large. By this, Mitchell brings lift to uncomfortable realities requisite to the art of the poet. Mitchell’s voice is both coastal and worldly, deeply engrained with locality at the edge of Ireland, and shows we must share together, make sense together. These poems will enrich the reader with their seeming ease, their timbres, their opening onto new, fresh knowledge of a world to which the reader, too, is given intimate presence.
– Sean Borodale
AUTHOR BIO:
Geraldine Mitchell is a Dublin-born poet and writer who has been living on the Mayo coast for over 20 years. A Patrick Kavanagh Award winner, she is widely published and anthologised. Naming Love is her fifth collection.
PRAISE FOR IMPOSSIBLE BLACKBIRD:
This collection is spacious, generous, it contains weathers and music, the wilds of Connemara, personal experience and tragedies, foreign cities, meditations on politics, philosophy, blackberries and wild hares, and of course tributes to the poet’s love and “in-house muse” Annie. To follow the poet’s discursive, supple stanzas from page to page is to marvel how miraculously he has joined moment to moment, how he has made a story that has become a life.
– Eva Bourke
Once more Ted Deppe binds us in a gently potent spell where the physicality of lived experience is mixed through with the philosophical and we are left ‘touched by the inexplicable’. Impossible Blackbird is a deeply rewarding and, against all odds, consoling collection.
– Geraldine Mitchell
AUTHOR BIO:
Theodore Deppe is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Impossible Blackbird (Arlen House, 2024). Before moving to Ireland from the US in 2000, he won a Pushcart Prize and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. He lives in Renvyle.
