From Booklist
War poisons life on the home front even half a world away from the battleground, a hidden truth Monaghan reveals with emotional acuity and striking imagery in her strongest collection to date. Writing from the perspective of the children of soldiers in stealthy and incandescent poems in which each word has the weight of a fist, a stone, a bullet, a bomb, she envisions a house full of guns where "even dreams weren't safe." In a mythic vein, Monaghan, a citizen of both America and Ireland with a passion for Celtic culture, writes ravishing balladic poems of Ireland's bloody struggles, capturing the romance and tragedy of rebellion. With verve and mastery, she even retells the story of the legendary seventh-century Irish king, Sweeney, who was driven mad by war. Finally, Monaghan writes arrestingly of the terrible legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the questionable wars that followed. Disclosing and haunting, Monaghan's exquisitely restrained, powerfully resonant poems of protest articulate the feelings of many on the home front who keep watch and suffer in silence. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
