Throat Full of Feathers

"In Lorna Shaughnessy's Throat Full of Feathers time refuses to move in straight lines. It dissolves, gathers, and returns in fragments--moments of real beauty refracted through memory. These poems are shards of light and shadow, of voices and their echoes that blur and merge, speaking of metamorphosis and the fragile architecture of remembrance. There is a rare brilliance in her fearless play with form--monologues, sonnets and free verse--vessels for many voices. This collection becomes an experiment in fracture and flow: a chorus of sisters, stories told and retold, weaving selves and family, and the vast sweep of history into song. Through the ache of change, language bends and reshapes itself; time advances with a quiet dignity, carrying the hum of what cannot be spoken."Elaine Feeney"Lorna Shaughnessy's sixth collection invites the reader to set out like the child addressed in the opening poem, 'on a night no sirens sound', warning that 'safe passage' will depend ultimately on trusting the senses - 'the sound of your own footfall, /your breath' as guide. This leads into poems which negotiate many kinds of damaging territory: physical, ecological, emotional, psychological and metaphorical. There are riveting monologues that give contemporary voice to the trauma of survivors in handed-down tales of faery and folklore. These echo the weight of loss at the heart of the book - the loss of a middle sister: 'Your name, the root word. /Ours, the prefix and suffix/bereft of meaning.' This weight of grief is processed through the whole body of exquisite poems, stripping away all pretence until the poet has finally 'aligned...with the silence of the woods/in the moments after birdsong fades at dusk/their song still ringing in my inner ear, untellable/as the loss I could not find a tune for.' This is Shaughnessy at the height of her powers: drawing deeply on linguistics, experience and imagination, employing original spatial forms, attuned to rhythm, sound and silence. A remarkable work of art and love."Ruth Carr"Throat Full of Feathers is a stunning body of work; the poems are both exquisitely crafted and imbued with rich depths of story that carry the reader on a voyage through many moods and challenges. Some of the poems are mythical, beguiling as fairytales; they open us into previously undiscovered landscapes that somehow reconnect us with lost parts of ourselves. But the real heft of this fine collection is Shaughnessy's account of loss and grief; her intimate, deeply felt poems of lament are suffused with such poignancy and poise that the reader finds themselves transformed. Rarely has mourning been so elegantly translated."Grace Wells