Catching Bats Takes Patience

Catching Bats Takes Patience

By Mary Kennelly

All the parts of everyday life are unclothed and transformed in Catching Bats Takes Patience. Mary Kennelly looks at the routine of domestic life and motherhood and picks it apart, revealing a hidden layer of emotion and depth to her everyday life.

Nothing is off limits. These are the poems of a mother, a partner, a lover: grown in the garden, watered with spring rain, scrubbed in the kitchen sink, seasoned with lust, mellowed by familiarity and finished off with tears of loss. There are clothes to be ironed, a scraped knee to kiss, homework to be done and a loo-roll shortage to cope with.

Mary Kennelly wades forward through all the bittersweet themes of Catching Bats Takes Patience, exploring with uncompromising honestly the complexities of life in a beguilingly sincere tone.

 

Reviews

Catching Bats Takes Patience is a joy of a book, a pleasure to read. Mary Kennelly elevates the mundane, she blesses the commonplace. She is a poet of love, of loss, of letting go, a lover of sweet anarchy who in a world where Christ lies bleeding can still choose redemptive laughter.

Gabriel Fitzmaurice    

Poet Mary Kennelly’s language is powerful, emotive, fearless and heartbreakingly honest.

Ann Egan   

I love this book...It has universal appeal and there are themes that a lot of people will identify with.

Deirdre Walsh, Radio Kerry   

There is love and tenderness and laughter, delivered through words simple, direct and elemental.

The Kerryman