Agnes Walsh

Going Around with Bachelors Agnes Walsh

Poetry. "Agnes Walsh's poetry is like nothing else you will read: 'clean as a shriek,' declarative, funny in all the expected places, full of unadorned wisdom and bone-naked sadness. There is no word for what you will find here-the closest we have is truth"--Lisa Moore. Agnes Walsh's voice, rich with the tang of Newfoundland speech, melds the plain and the sophisticated. Her beloved St. John's and Placentia Bay, Portugal, and Ireland provide the distinctive scenes of these plain and dazzling poems. Her poetry goes deep, without ever scanting surfaces so respected and so lovingly rendered, as to be felt as holy. A child may feel "that shiver of life / when it holds you and shakes you between not knowing / and knowing something" but it takes a real poet, a grown-up in language, to say it right. Agnes Walsh sustains the shiver of life right the way through GOING AROUND WITH BACHELORS.