Naming Love is a collection of poetry that sings of love and mystery and the unknown as well as of solitude and loneliness and the quiet hours of reckoning. It’s a collection that loves the world through awestruck observation. It celebrates birds and weeds and the changing of the seasons. It laments loss of people and loss of nature. It tracks the changing of the seasons. It notices the little things in the everyday and makes them marvellous. – Jane Clarke
In Geraldine Mitchell’s stunning new collection, Naming Love, the opening three lines sound a fanfare: “a blackbird knaps/ the flint of my heart,/sparks fly”. The surfaces of Mitchell’s poems are like a “whistling/soughing, simmering//summer garden” alive with presences from nature that invite us into a world that feels both familiar and strange. Inside all this music, there is a profound silence; mysteries resonate, unspoken, at the heart of these poems. This is a book of marvels. – Theodore Deppe
Elegiac, unflinching, tender, Geraldine Mitchell’s poems in Naming Love are distinctly celebratory. Here are poems of luminous refuge enlivened by responsibility to difficulty and to undistorted report.
Mitchell excels in expanding and calibrating a lexicon of the poetic through personal, situated use; words into phrases, phrases into poems, tuning poems across each other to detonate at cellular level, awaken a granular power; micro-poems built of just a few words which unfold large. By this, Mitchell brings lift to uncomfortable realities requisite to the art of the poet. Mitchell’s voice is both coastal and worldly, deeply engrained with locality at the edge of Ireland, and shows we must share together, make sense together. These poems will enrich the reader with their seeming ease, their timbres, their opening onto new, fresh knowledge of a world to which the reader, too, is given intimate presence. – Sean Borodale
