Silver Spoon

After five chapbooks and ten years writing poetry, this first full collection has a wide wingspan and a sharp eye. Migrating from Dublin to Lough Gara, on the Sligo Roscommon border, the intimacies of personal life sit easily next to global themes of conflict, the environment, migration, and the universal matters of love and death. Politics - with a small p - are always just under the skin of Jessamine O'Connor’s writing, but she avoids telling the reader what to think, instead she shows by example how to feel.

These barefaced poems don’t back down from anything or anyone. Jessamine takes her pen to the world around her and documents it in all its misshappen ugliness and all its impossible beauty. These poems don’t flinch from how much life hurts but somehow in their humour, kindness and lightness they show us how to love it anyway.
-Sarah Clancy

With Illustrations by Helen Chantrell.