Playing the Octopus
"He avoids the pipes. He has his reasons.
He has heard the story
Of the octopus who was locked into a room
For a week to practice.
When they let him out the pipes had learned
To play the octopus.
The thing about musicians is
They respond to glory".
In "Playing the Octopus", her eighth collection of poems, Mary O'Malley's sensitivity to the spirit of Ireland's west coast is as attuned as ever. In a world both earthen and dreamlike, bodily and mythical, a trout is seen to "swallow light through his skin", a wolf "howls the great open vowel of his need", and in the emptiness where a tree once stood, "a tree-shaped brightness dances". Over the course of the collection, O'Malley twins the Irish west coast with the American east coast, Inis Mor with Coney Island, the parish with the metropolis, the pipes with the axe, each offering its own comfort and wonder. Sylvia Plath, Lois Lane and Antigone feature in an unlikely cast of heroines through which O'Malley tests the mythologies of motherhood and femininity ("no mother is ever good enough until she's dead", writes the poet, with characteristic wit). Playing the Octopus is a body of writing buoyed by the redemptive power and sustaining joy of music, and it closes with O'Malley's translations of the Irish poet Sean o Riordain and the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca.
About the Author
Mary O'Malley was born in Connemara in Ireland, and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at the Universidade Nova there. She served on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cuirt International Poetry Festival for eight years. She was the author of its educational programme. She taught on the MA programmes for Writing and Education in the Arts at NUIGalway for ten years, held the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2013, and has held Residencies in Paris, Tarragona, New York, NUI Galway, as well as in Derry, Belfast. She is active in environmental education, specifically marine. She is a member of Aosdana and has won a number of awards for her poetry, including the 2016 Arts Council University of Limerick Writer's Fellowship. She writes and broadcasts for RTE Radio regularly.
Reviews
"O'€™Malley is a true artist in sketching the beautiful, small details without which the essence of place, and the identity dependent on it, can be all too easily erased" – Eavan Boland
"This new collection by one of Irelanda€™s most respected and radical poets is as exhilarating a read as the title promises. Sampling through levels of irony from the neolithic to the neon lights of the lonely cities, from east to west, and indeed the hackneyed wesht (with a characteristically wicked eye), O'Malley offers us lyrics of the salvific quotidian woven together with the surreal elements of surviving our island paradoxes. Insouciant as the pirate queen Grace O'Malley who downfaced Elizabeth the First, Mary O'Malley steps into a zone of power and mastery with these new poems" – Paula Meehan
