Books
Naming Love (Arlen House, 2024)
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
Mute/Unmute (Arlen House, 2020)
The quietly assured Mute/Unmute is Geraldine Mitchell’s fourth collection. The poems here are not simply written in a minor key; rather they represent an out-of-tuneness with the world. This unease, this discomfort – whether it is on the part of an observer unable to make sense of the world, or the world itself that is impermeable – is the territory explored here, to great effect.
– Richard Hayes, Poetry Ireland Review #134
As political as it is personal and as global as it is local, this intensely moving collection pays homage to people and place with sensuous detail and profound empathy.
– Jane Clarke
There’s a lot of darkness here, but that darkness never feels depressing. There’s too much light in the language, too much craft and passion in the making. Mitchell has dreamed up a black tulip of a book that can surprise us with brightness as it pours out the dark.
– Theodore Deppe
A deeply perceptive poet with a keen sense of the natural world, Mitchell’s poems both offer a timely warning that the planet is mortal, and offer a reassuring reminder of life’s cyclical nature. These poems are a stunning sketch of a world that is a place of great beauty and great challenge. Mitchell reflects on a life marked out in distances – between cities; the sky to the sea; the spaces between the paw prints of a wolf; masterfully excavating extraordinary glimpses of the ordinary. These poems listen, watch, and unearth a voice for the voiceless – from Mayo and far beyond – Mitchell explores humans at their most vulnerable. And when our systems fail, the counter pressures of love and humanity are all we have. An assured and powerful collection, Mute/Unmute is contemporary poetry in its finest.
– Elaine Feeney
Mountains for Breakfast (Arlen House, 2017)
Geraldine Mitchell’s work is characterised by a rare quality of attention and subtlety. Her images are deft and precise — ‘the road runs with braided water’. In many of her poems she successfully evokes the contradictions which we experience every day of our human lives. Understatement is one of her most powerful tools. In her latest collection she brings us down the long corridor of loss and she heralds the return of light, often the western light of Mayo and Clare Island. This is work as fine as it is strong.
– Moya Cannon
Geraldine Mitchell’s Mountains for Breakfast is a complex, honest shipping forecast of a book. Heavy grief-weather and a relentless joy wave-wash these poems in crystalline language.
–Alice Lyons
Of Birds and Bones (Arlen House, 2014)
About Of Birds and Bones, Nessa O’Mahony wrote: Mitchell’s vision doesn’t spare us the harsh realities of a world where people doss in phone boxes or refugees suffer from somebody else’s war; the anger is restrained, and is all the more powerful for it.
[Trumpet, Poetry Ireland, April 2014]
World Without Maps (Arlen House, 2011)
World Without Maps is a cartography of psychological landscapes that makes her readers look deep within themselves. Mitchell is interested in the frozen and lost moments of time. She creates a poetic universe that is teeming with imaginary possibilities but also human tragedies. Mitchell is an expert at capturing moments that others sidestep: whether it is an unborn child’s first unnoticed kicks or a mentally ill person’s moment of internal quiet, she seems to inhabit these spaces with empathy and a powerful poetic awareness. Death is a central axis around which the volume moves. Lull describes what it would be like to step outside of time’s relentless devouring of life and become a painting, “no breath . . . no movement . . . no sound but the soft hiss of sand”, and concludes with the powerful image of Earth turning, where “cell by cell, / gravity bent, blades are sucked / into movement”. Mitchell’s poetry is perceptive, astute and technically sophisticated: World Without Maps is an exceptional debut collection that deserves critical attention and acclaim.
[Borbála Faragó, The Irish Times, 27 August 2011]
Deeds Not Words: the life and work of Muriel Gahan (Town House, 1997)
In 1930 Muriel Gahan set up that unique Dublin institution, The Country Shop, in St Stephen’s Green and steered its course for close on fifty years. She was deeply involved in the Royal Dublin Society and the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and was directly responsible for setting up Country Markets Ltd., the Irish Homespun Society and the Crafts Council of Ireland. Muriel’s motto was that of the Society of United Irishwomen, Deeds not Words. This is the story behind those deeds, disentangled strand by strand from the cat’s cradle of interconnecting organisations she became involved with and through which she worked. It is also a tribute to the countless women and men who worked with and around her.
In this illuminating and tender biography, Geraldine Mitchell traces the life of Muriel Gahan, a unique woman who nurtured the creative and social life of rural women and craftworkers and made them matter to an ordinarily uncaring society.
Escape to the West (Attic Press, 1994)
Aoife takes a summer job at Innisfree House, a home for elderly women. She meets one of the women, Mrs Imogen O’Toole, who is proud, fiercely independent and determined to unmask the shady practices of the bad-tempered matron.
Teenage girl and elderly woman become partners in adventure as they escape to the west.
Welcoming the French (Attic Press, 1992)
When 13-year-old Gemma decides to help a group of young French refugees enjoy a holiday in Connemara in the West of Ireland, she never imagines that her life could become so complicated or that things cold go so wrong.
As busloads of French teenagers arrive in Gemma’s town she thinks that all eventualities have been catered for. Everything goes well until two of them go missing…!