Mary Rose O'Reilley – författare

Half Wild is spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O'Reilley's collection hangs on to life like the bee ""up to his hips in love"" who ""will fall asleep in the snow"" and ""wake up still kissing his flower."" In O'Reilley's poems, human, animal, and mineral creations interpenetrate and share surreal conversation - even stones exchange stories of ""hot times in the magma"" and animals are listened to intently. Here sacred inquiry is grounded in a passion for the natural world, resolving questions through lyric, erotic, and sensual response. The poems of Half Wild revel in desire and longing as instruments of theological critique. You were the part of me that gave itself to death. Sometimes I dream of eyes, sealed with a membrane of unknowing like a mystic's veil, that open to my glance without surprise. Sometimes I dream of perfect understanding. Sometimes I snatchat hands that seem to seek as through a caul. Sometimes I waken With an infant's shriek. - from ""Twin

In her new collection, Earth, Mercy, Mary Rose O'Reilley sifts through the debris of human habitation -- pink thong sandals, curlers, broken televisions -- looking for a kind of junkyard grace: ""Holiness enters again / turquoise fins, and the Cessna's carapace / lifts on its wind."" The first poem, ""Genesis,"" locates the reader in Edenic time, ""in that humid and green / arrival,"" while the last, ""Watching the End of the World from Hovland, Minnesota,"" gives nature a final word: ""Morels on goat prairie gloat / in their blue light. Spruce / speaking of green on green."" Between these points, any poem offers a threshold over which something unexpected may pass -- a ghost, an angel, or the yap of an insouciant dog alerting us to apocalypse. Against all that threatens our survival, Earth, Mercy asserts the beauty of our poignantly sensual life.

At midlife, Mary Rose O’Reilley writes, we are called to an “archaeology of memory”—turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there—to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. Excavating her own life, she traces the middle-class Irish American background that shaped her, with its mix of antic humor, terror, and mysticism, and finds meaning in the seemingly smallest, most transient encounters.But O’Reilley’s purpose is less to recount these moments than it is to find the language for a different kind of story, in which the narrative of daily life opens to admit the holy and its corollary, the comic. Encouraging all of us to contemplate our own deep story, she calls hers a demo-life, in which the facts of personal history ground a narrative of consciousness and perception.Earthy and luminous, unconventional and profoundly illuminating, The Love of Impermanent Things offers a threshold ecology for readers of all ages.