Grace Wells Book order

Things being so urgent, when you open a book its leaves should take you back to the forest they came from ... ('Vestige') So opens the first poem in Grace Wells' The Church of the Love of the World, a book that begs us to "only connect" as it explores our individual roles - and the role of poetry itself - in these troubling times. At once sure-footed and curious, optimistic and on the brink of despair, as well as stand-out lyric moments, the book features a number of longer poems and sequences, among them the extraordinary 'She Gathers the Wild Grasses' which explores our very real dependence on grasses, the evolution of society itself made possible by their contribution. As elsewhere, memory, myth, anecdote and hands-on experience are all woven together to produce, among other things,"my own dough - // something forever illiterate / and welcome / in signing each crust with my mark". The Church of the Love of the World is a powerful and passionate new book, confirming the promise of Wells' previous collection, Fur, described in Poetry Ireland Review as work "that enlarges the possibilities of poetry".

Grace Wells' second collection of poems is a sustained meditation on our relationship with nature, with the flora and especially the fauna with which we share this "astonishing world." The poems are "awed by howl and answer-/ by whatever it is that longing does / when it meets itself in the woods." But if the relationship can be an enabling one, allowing the poet to go beyond the limits of herself, to put seal "skin onto her back" and walk out "into darkness," it is also one that our unthinking custodianship of the planet puts at risk. The poems of Fur do not see the animal realm as entirely other, as a place to view or visit. Indeed much of their strength derives from a refusal to acknowledge arbitrary boundaries. We encounter animals both as themselves and as symbols of some higher power. Against this transformative, redemptive power is woven a glimpsed narrative of emotional struggle and survival, of love and love lost; and a delicate balance is achieved.