‘This is a journey of a collection exploring the rugged terrain of the heart; of family, fragmented place, memory, dialect, class,’ – Rachel Long.
‘Poems that you want to sing along to. Poems that you want to drink along to,’ – Henry Bell, Gutter Magazine.
‘Ellen McAteer bewitches us,’ – Sudeep Sen.
Reviews
Sue Wallace-Shaddad admires Ellen McAteer’s use of imagery and metaphor in the construction of this powerful collection. ‘This collection certainly packs a punch; it is honest and visceral.’
Mslexia Magazine (online via Exact Editions)
More words about this book
‘These are poems that contain all the blood and guts and love and pain of family. Poems that take you deep into places that you have never been but which you nevertheless know intimately. Poems that you want to sing along to. Poems that you want to drink along to. Poems that are at once comforting and troubling. Some of the poems here are so beautifully crafted that you feel sure they must be the work of decades, and others feel surely like they must have arrived all at once in a lightning bolt. There is so much to enjoy in this book by Ellen McAteer.’ Henry Bell
‘From the psychological and physical horrors of a hospital emergency ward “When the metal folding cot eats my brother, and he screams as it bites, I try to bewitch it open”; to the fanning out My Deep and Gorgeous Thirst — Ellen McAteer bewitches us, and yet does not shy away from hard subjects; ones she confronts with an intricate lace of words, with the skill of a surgeon’s scalpel. She writes, “In a desperate desire to escape the white room, I feel the wriggle inside me, a swallowed spider of awkwardness force-fed to me by the teacher to catch a fly which was swallowed because it wanted to disappear.” McAteer’s poetry is simultaneously visceral, playful and colourful, one that “reveal our stark truth”. Using free verse and prose poetry modes, she injects an energy into her lines that make them leap out of the page. “Molest me with your tongue instead”, she says, urging us to read her work, rewarding us with “the mirror’s cold unblinking gaze.” This book demands reading and rereading.’ Sudeep Sen
Buy from Red Squirrel Press.
“Landscape becomes a character in the taut poems of Honesty Mirror, poems which chart both the inevitable— ‘water pulling sky to sea’—and the surprising—ghosts glimpsed in the mirror, supernatural glimmers on a city street—with precision and grace. We find ourselves in a strange, familiar place where ‘our faces are the only language we have’.”
Helen Mort
Reviews
Ode to a Motorway
The blurb for Honesty Mirror describes this collection as a ‘psychogeographical study in how an unspoken inner life can be projected onto landscapes’. Surprisingly (yes, really), it is the roads in this pamphlet which really piqued my interest. Ellen McAteer’s poem about the M6 in ‘As the Crow Flies’ elevates an ordinary motorway landscape into something profound.’ Vic Pickup
Ellen McAteer 