The Knife in the Wave - Salmon Poetry First edition

Mary O'Malley moves from the clear topography of her last collection, Where the Rocks Float, to probe the underwater world prefigured in her long poem sequence 'The Cave' from that collection. She does this by a process of inversion as 'The Seal Woman' struggles through her agonising journey from one element to another, entering the mythos to explore the nature of the poet's condition.

In 'Ms. Panacea Regrets' O'Malley links the altered state that accompanies extreme physical pain to the indifference of those empowered to administer relief. Her almost total reliance on poetry at a time when faith had failed her is central to this poem, and she likens the process of rehabilitation to learning to live with English, in the place of the Irish to which she feels entitled.

There are poems of loss and of delight but this is above all a book written out of a fractured world: torn breath, the gap between languages, the rents in a poem. O'Malley never allows herself the luxury of false certainty but we glimpse occasionally the brilliance of the lost innocence she both regrets and celebrates.