Description
Praise for Province of Fire
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
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
