In Other Words
In this debt collection, published in 2010, Mary Madec explores the intractable intimacies of our connection with the world, from the first memories and love, to brave and incisive portraits of real and imagined lives. Mary finds an idiom for a complex inner world which resonates truths we all know. There is an underlying compassion and humour in this book which takes us to new places in ourselves and an intelligence and clarity which helps us to see exactly where in fact we are. In April 2008, Mary Madec was the recipient of the Hennessy XO Award for Emerging Poetry for her long poem 'In Other Words' which appears in this collection. The presenting judge, Douglas Kennedy wrote:
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'Mary's poem dazzled me immediately with its chutzpah, its linguistic fireworks and its intellectual brio. It's a poem about identity that is densely argued and unrepentantly smart.'​
Demeter Does Not Remember
Mary Madec's second collection, published in 2014, is held by a narrative, like the one which each of us makes to hold our lives together. It takes as its inspiration the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone to explore the human journey of mother, daughter, lover. The duality of light and darkness in the cycle of the seasons provides a backdrop for an awareness of personal transformation which seeks truce with age. Many poems trace how insights comes, and memory functions in shaping our lives. Though not autobiographical, this book is deeply personal.
“Quietly stunning,
exquisitely crafted poems.”
Joseph Horgan
The Egret lands With News from Other Parts
In Mary Madec's third collection of poetry she returns to the real world of what it means to be herself, a woman of these times, exploring again the territories of the heart. Published in 2019, the book presents a partly imagined trajectory, extending beyond the present and deep in the past, reaching into the experiences of silence and calling out the 'voices.'
Her poems are compassionate and courageous, sensual and sometimes visceral meditations on the injured or ageing body, the broken heart, the reality of our ineluctably transient lives and attendant grief. And yet there are light touches of redeeming humour, and always the Little White Egret of hope cancelling out the darkness. Her language is rich and precise, sensitive to how it must map the tangles of mind and heart in this poetic project, which asks the poet to tell us what it is we are made of, what it is that makes it possible for us to walk on the this earth and be sufficient to ourselves.
“The book is extraordinary, celebrating the, “crazy mystery of good agony,” in a solemn mixture of the banal and the prophetic; these are poems about poems and poets, birds and the bible, war and married life, children and childhood, insects and parents. Deeply rooted in Irish myth they explore female territories explicitly, culminating in moving dirges for the mother figure”. Madbh McGuckain