This is Geraldine Connolly's second book of poetry. Her first book (Food for the Winter) published by Perdue University Press was very well received and is in its second printing. Connolly is an outstanding poet with a large following. We are receiving a lot of prepublication orders for this book and we think that it will do well.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
Patterns of image in a poem are a form of thinking, and Connolly is an intelligent writer, restrained, yet bold and capable of embodying her landscapes with complexity and resonance.
--Tony Hoagland, Cimarron Review
--Tony Hoagland, Cimarron Review
Connolly is a "soaring beast with smoking hair," a poet who has not turned sheepish or haggard, not been swallowed, as her ancestors were, by harsh lives in the mine and factory. She has survived fears and fights of her childhood with a springing energy that gives lilt to her lines. In these poems she draws crisp and keenly felt portraits of her family and claims herself as a powerful woman come into her active and sexual own.
--Stephanie Strickland
"Someone has make this journey for me/and I must continue the story," Geraldine Connolly writes, and in these avid, joyous, and sorrowful autobiographical poems she keeps that vow, memorializing her Catholic girlhood, her parents' experiences as worker, her immigrant ancestry. An irrepressible female spirit rises to the surface across the generations, and she is after nothing less that "the true wildness/within her." To read Province of Fire is to feel its radiating heat.
--Edward Hirsch
About the Author
Born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Geraldine Connolly grew up in Westmoreland County and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh. She worked on the staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library from 1971-1975 and attended graduate school at the University of Maryland. She has received two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, one in 1987 and one in 1995. In 188, she received a Works-in-Progress grant from the Maryland Arts Council and in 1990, a Maryland Arts Council Fellowship. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Breadloaf Writers Conference and has held residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Chautauqua Institute.
Her chapbook, A Red Room, was published by Heatherstone Press in 1988 and a full-length collection, Food for the Winter, by Purdue University Press in 1990. She recently co-edited The Open Door, an anthology of work from Poet Lore. Her work has appeared widely in literary magazines, including Antioch Review, Chelsea, The Gettysburg Review, Shenadoah, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest. She was awarded the Carolyn Kizer prize from Poetry Northwest in 1989 and won the National Ekphrastic Poetry Competition in 1998. Her work has been recorded and broadcast on WPFW Radio's "The Poet and the Poem." She teaches poetry at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland and at Johns Hopkins' Washington D.C. Graduate Writing Program.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful, coming-of-age collection of poems.,
By Plumetta (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Province of Fire (Paperback)
What a striking new book of poems "Province of Fire" is. Geraldine Connolly's voice resonates long after you've read this collection of poems on growing up Catholic, immigrant roots and finally, embracing womanhood. Her intense lyricism sings of hardship and restraint, yet the energy here burns through the surface, making these poems ones to carry with you. "Siberia" is a fabulous poem. In it she writes, "The locomotive/pulls us with its fierce body,/through fencing,/strange tongues of night/porters, morning's despairs/to begin and begin." To step into Connolly's "Province of Fire" is a multi-layered pleasure. I didn't want to leave.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A free verse exploration of a Catholic immigrant past,
By Nola Garrett (Palm Harbor, FL) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Province of Fire (Paperback)
Slipping between sentimentality and confession, PROVNICE OF FIRE is a painterly collection of free verse poems of a woman honestly exploring her Pittsburgh family's immigrant past and her Catholic upbringing. While the poems look back they progress from the speaker's witty teen-age rebellion ("Why I Was Sent to Boarding School") through quiet revelation ("Mother, A Young Wife Learns to Sew") to a delicate acceptance in "Painter of the Morning': But I cannot give the girl / her childhood back, nor can I invent / a magnificent ending. I can only sit here / and think and make streaks across a page, / pen strokes that are light and sure. To paint / the morning is good. It fills the hours with pleasure / as more drops fall, changing the world / in slow degree, changing. It may be that PROVINCE OF FIRE is an exciting title, but Painter of the Morning might be a more accurate title; for Geraldine Connolly has not only painted rather than burned, but also has added to our sacred space--poetry.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Forgiveness as Redemption, a review by Joanna C. Scott,
By WORDHOUSE (wrdhouse@aol.com) (Baltimore, Maryland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Province of Fire (Paperback)
As in Food for the Winter and The Red Room, Geraldine Connolly's third volume of poetry deals with that most basic unit of society: the family. In PROVINCE OF FIRE, however, Connolly extends her vision to the broader concepts of forgiveness and redemption, not as religious experience, although both derive from it, but as earned through the artistic struggle. The poems are delicately wrought and subtle, no word wasted, with a simplicity belying depths that reveal themselves only in contemplation. The collection is an account of the journey to maturity, the struggle to break away from the twin restrictions of a Catholic childhood and the molding hand of Mother. All the poems are spoken in a single voice, but the voice changes. Section I is spoken by the petulant child, blind to everything except her own small view of life. As Frank McCourt so famously has said, "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Connolly's was a variation on this: a miserable Pittsburgh Catholic childhood. We see her struggling against her mother, against the nuns, against God himself, resisting every effort to be made into "a good flat prize of a girl." And yet, as my sainted mother used to say, suffering is good for the soul. It was good for Connolly's, at least for her poetic soul. While the child writhed under the constrictions of the mass like a "brooding land mine waiting to explode," the woman was learning "to stay silent . . . to go inward," which is the poet's discipline. While the child fumed "in a labyrinth of prayer and response," the woman was absorbing the repetitious beauty of the liturgy. So when Connolly gives us "Procession of All Souls," we hear the priest's voice chanting: "Gnarled and blessed / be the hour of autumn when / spotted pears sink / into wet sod and blessed be / the songs of virgins rising / into hunchbacked trees." Poem after poem exhibits this same lovely liturgical quality. Not just the aural sensation, but the religious words themselves take on new meaning. Thus, the child "locked in chastity's cupboard" becomes the adult who "loves the rip / of silk across skin, / the cold rush / of renunciation." Section II is spoken in a universal voice, the poet as storyteller. It tells of her family's migration to America, of their struggles, their dreams and tragedies, their stiff-necked ambitions for their children. Here is grandfather going to his labor in the coal mine:"chokedamp, stinkdamp, afterdamp-into the basket with strangers, dropping / into that other world." Here is the hope that leads him on: "as if it were the north star / rising off his sooty forehead." Judgement is withheld here. There is tenderness and understanding, humor, pity, never sentimentality. Section III deals once more with childhood but is now told in the voice of the adult looking back and is set in the perspective of the ancestry discovered in the previous section. The final poem of this group, "Province of Fire," is pivotal. It describes the construction of an outsider artist, a Throne of the Third Heaven made of "radiant, alarming tinfoil . . . exploding into crowns and snowflakes . . ." an "apocalypse of wood and paper." By poem's end, God himself descends to inhabit this bizarre construction, but attention does not remain on him. The spotlight narrows, focusing like a blessing onto the bowed head of the working artist, "one who has labored / in dim light with glue and straight pins / and has not been afraid." These lines refer back to a previous poem, "White Silk, Hope Chest" in which the mother is shown bowed above her needle creating "her daughters' lives from the selvedge of the past." And so the child as adult has come to comprehend the value of the Mother. Section IV gives us the fully mature woman and is spoken in her voice. However much she may have tried to shake off her early religious training, this collection is inspired and fueled by it, and from it derive many of its fiercest and most powerful images. The final image of the book is perhaps the most telling. From a child rebelling against her mother, the adult in the final poem, "Where the Wave Begins," becomes mother to her mother, waking from a dream of losing her, reaching out to her, watching her slip off into death. This is a universal experience, but Connolly makes it peculiarly her own. As her mother's hand slips out of hers, the poet feels "her small handprint / pressed like a burn / into my hand." This image of the stigmata is remarkable. We are left with a vision of the poet staring, astonished, at her own hand, realizing she has come to terms not just with Mother but with God. And not just come to terms: she has become that most fully developed of beings, one who is prepared to offer herself in sacrifice. In three short lines she has redeemed herself. -- Joanna C. Scott
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