Product Description
The Owl Inside presents an often haunted and feral, sometimes confessional and domesticated enquiry into what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene. These poems are suffused with musings on the escape to outer space, secret communications between trees, the movements of birds, suburban trampolines, motherhood, midnight wanderings, the climate crisis, motorbikes, affairs, bushfires and barbie dolls, yet in all this lies a quest for what can be found just beyond the material, heading towards the numinous.
‘The Owl Inside dictates everyday encounters with alterity, as if Jack Spicer was a single mum shacked up on the shores of Lake Macquarie, distilling a language of the alien self. Ireland’s collection is a paean to pent up frustrations and anxieties, absolved by a humble heuristics of living. Her muse: bin night.’ – Keri Glastonbury
‘This is a poetry all at once sensuous, moving, strange and familiar. The language springs gazelle-like from original thought to thought as the poet pulls apart our modes of perception then finds luminous ways to put them together again.’ – Judy Johnson
‘The Owl Inside is both a development of and a departure from Ivy Ireland’s previous work. What remains is her sharp-eyed engagement with complex ideas and the electric zap of her language. What is new, or at least enhanced, is a lyrical openness to emotions, personal history and the everyday. The Owl Inside is a rewarding read.’ – Brook Emery
REVIEWS
“In her latest collection, The Owl Inside, Ireland prods at the human yearning for the mysterious and the sublime. To some extent, this volume is a tribute to the overwhelming and overpowering forces of the non-human world. The beauty of Ireland’s poetry can be seen in how she places the human and the non-human, the ordinary and the extraordinary, as mirror images reflecting each other’s troubled conditions.” JEROME MASAMAKA, Westerly Magazine
“Ireland creates alchemy that is nothing short of gorgeous. The cadence of the poems in The Owl Inside is gentle—as if whispered directly into your head, skipping the ears altogether. The themes are familiar ones: the loneliness of single parenting, global warming, guilt about what humans are doing to the planet, the many species we’ve destroyed, relationship breakdown, and the difficulty of artistic practice against a backdrop of parenting, and yet always, against these struggles, there is a transformation.” MAGDALENA BALL, Compulsive Reader
“Once you open Ivy Ireland’s The Owl Inside you’ll find yourself within a spell zone…There is a certain tongue-in-cheek feeling to her poems, a humour, and a lightness of the heart, despite it all. Motherhood meets climate disruption, meets space travel, meets the guilt of a non-free-range drive-thru breakfast, meets the wondrous communication of trees.” ANNE-SOPHIE BALZER, Plumwood Mountain Journal
