Wild Nest, No Prison
Poetry by Marita O'Neill
7 x 10 paperback, 80 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9903529-4-0 ; $18.50
available soon for early orders
Endorsements
The poems in Wild Nest, No Prison are full of marvels. In the first one, there’s a beaver dam with twigs sticking out like a “fury of knitting needles.” And where does Marita O’Neill take us in that wonderful poem? Into all the dynamic contradictions that make up our lives, a “world of palm press and float,” “a home of teeter and collapse.” That “float” includes many places and cultures she makes vivid for us, especially Istanbul where she taught for several years. The “teeter and collapse” hint at the ruins caused by addiction in a family and marriage. But if those “ruins” lead to grief, they also lead to wisdom and a deep caring for all who are lost or wayward or vulnerable, animal and human. As to the “palm press”—that’s the shaping, the art and joy of these poems that are rich and surprising, sometimes even
a little surreal. O’Neill asks questions that are finally spiritual: “How to lay it all down? How to put to rest the angry roots that refuse to give?” And give is what this book does. It gives shape to pain and becomes a vehicle to carry us through. It gives us music to keep us alive and wanting to be alive. These are beautiful, grace-filled songs of going on.
—Betsy Sholl
Marita O’Neill is one of those rare poets who writes intensely about personal devastation yet never allows herself to play the role of victim. Even as these poems track the dissolution of a marriage, the brutality of addiction, even as they plumb the disasters of our world, the speaker’s voice lingers on kindness, on forgiveness. The result is an earnest and moving portrait of how human beings manage to survive, even to sing, within great pain and fear. Marita’s poems embody the courage of hope, and I’m
so grateful for them.
—Dawn Potter, author of Calendar
In this collection Marita bravely explores her grief and heeds Frost’s advice that “the only way out is through.” As her title poem notes, though, the book is both a “Nest to hold the cracked things and set them loose” so in the end, whether she’s revisiting the difficulties of her ended marriage or family history, each poem, invariably, leads to transforming pain, grief, and darkness in a way that allows her to find healing and fly back into her life. In the end, too, I love the collection for how it is simply driven
by an urge to discover how one might love the world again. The fact that so many beautiful poems are created from these dark, difficult experiences is both a testament to her as a poet and as the reader’s wise, Virgil-like guide. I say, then, to all readers standing at the gate of this book: ‘embrace hope all ye who enter” this dark wood. Nest in this collection!
—Dennis Camire