The Knife in the Wave

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.There are poems of loss and of delight but this is above all a book written out of a fractured 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.