Conamara Blues

by John O'Donohue

Overview

Translating the beauty and splendor of his native Conamara into a language exquisitely attuned to the wonder of the everyday, John O'Donohue takes us on a moving journey through real and imagined worlds. Divided into three parts -- Approachings, Encounters, and Distances -- Conamara Blues at once reawakens a sense of intimacy with the natural world and a feeling of wonder at the mystery of our relationship to this world. Whether exploring the silent, eternal memory of Conamara or focusing on the power of language and the vagaries of human need and passion, O'Donohue tenderly reveals the fragile vulnerability of love and friendship. The result is a musical, transcendent, and deeply moving series of poems that exemplifies O'Donohue at his finest.

Written with penetrating insight and distilled transparence, Conamara Blues offers a singular and lasting imaginative vision of a landscape of hope and possibility -- powerfully exhibiting the mastery of a poet at the height of his lyric powers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061935763
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/26/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	291 KB

About the Author

John O'Donohue (1956-2008) was a poet, philosopher, and scholar and a native Gaelic speaker from County Clare, Ireland. He was awarded a PhD in Philosophical Theology from the University of Tübingen, with post-doctoral study of Meister Eckhart. John's numerous international bestselling books include Anam Cara, Beauty, Eternal Echoes, and the beloved To Bless the Space Between Us (published as Benedictus in Europe), among many others, guiding readers through the landscape of the Irish imagination. 

Read an Excerpt

Conamara Blues

Thought-Work

In memory of Joe Pilkington

Off course from the frail music sought by words

And the path that always claims the journey,

In the pursuit of a more oblique rhythm,

Creating mostly its own geography,

The mind is an old crow

Who knows only to gather dead twigs,

Then take them back to the vacancy

Between the branches of the parent tree

And entwine them around the emptiness

With silence and unfailing patience

Until what was fallen, withered and lost

Is now set to fill with dreams as a nest.

Conamara Blues. Copyright © by John O'Donohue. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

	Approachings
	Thought-Work	2
	First Words	3
	Nest	5
	Black Music in Conamara	7
	The Wound at the Side of the House	9
	Before the Beginning	11
	The Banshee's Grotto	13
	Wind Artist	15
	Elemental	17
	The Pleading	18
	The Secret of Thereness	19
	Breakage	21
	Inner Circle	22
	Fluent	23
	The Stillness Above Is Listening	24
	Mountain Christening	26
	The Night Underneath	28
	Decorum	30
	Imagined Origins	31
	Encounters: the Rosary Sonnets
	An Paidrin	34
	The Rosary	35
	The Joyful Mysteries	36
	The Annunciation	36
	The Visitation	37
	The Nativity	38
	The Presentation in the Temple	39
	The Finding in the Temple	40
	The Sorrowful Mysteries	41
	The Agony in the Garden	41
	The Scourging at the Pillar	42
	The Crowning with Thorns	43
	The Carrying of the Cross	44
	The Crucifixion	45
	The Glorious Mysteries	46
	The Resurrection	46
	The Ascension	47
	The Descent of the Holy Spirit	48
	The Assumption	49
	The Coronation	50
	Distances
	Words	52
	Wings	54
	The Transparent Border	56
	The Angel of the Bog	58
	Placenta	60
	Mountain-Looking	63
	Seduced?	65
	At the Edge	67
	Up the Mountain	68
	Prisons of Voice	70
	The Ocean Wind	71
	Outside a Cottage	73
	Breakage	75
	Double Exposure	76
	Elemental	78
	The Night	79
	Anchor	80
	A Burren Prayer	82
	Notes	84