In this Book
- The Wild Rose Asylum
- Book
- 2010
- Published by: The University of Akron Press
- Series: Akron Series in Poetry
summary
The poems of The Wild Rose Asylum offer a multi-faceted consideration of the historical phenomenon of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums, the largest and most controversial of which were run for 150 years, until 1996, by the Catholic Church. In poems that embrace both traditional and experimental forms, Rachel Dilworth’s work explores complex factors involved in the loss by thousands of Irish women of years of their lives, numerous aspects of their identities, and countless future possibilities to confinement and arduous unpaid laundry labor as “penitents” in these facilities for so-called “fallen” women. Pervaded by a cutting awareness of an incarceration of the spirit, as well as of the beauty and naturalness of so many women’s development being suppressed and denied, these poems navigate individual and collective voice and silences, the held and withheld and disappeared or ignored, with a grace and unflinching attention. Humane and wide-ranging, The Wild Rose Asylum is a researched act of witness to an issue rife with loss—poems that seek to be “bird enough to dive far/into the heart of it and bring up something.
Table of Contents
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- Title Page
- p. iii
- Author's Note
- p. ix
- The Magdalen Laundries
- pp. 3-4
- Body Sonnets
- p. 5
- The Cloistering of Mary Norris
- pp. 9-12
- The Heart of the Matter
- pp. 13-14
- Amazing Grace
- pp. 15-17
- Research Piece
- p. 18
- Falling Away
- pp. 19-20
- Five Images of Bliss
- pp. 32-35
- Mad Song Stanzas for a Coming of Age
- pp. 36-38
- Season's Greetings
- pp. 40-42
- A Bildungsroman for the Lads
- pp. 44-47
- Wild Fuchsia
- pp. 48-50
- Fragments of the Shattering Glass
- pp. 52-55
- Her Last Immolation
- pp. 56-58
- Oh Rose-His Dark Secret Love
- pp. 59-62
- Kimberlys on the Number Seventeen
- pp. 64-67
- The Glass Lake
- pp. 69-70
- The Butter Urn Resurrection
- pp. 72-75
- So Long Imagined
- pp. 76-78
- World View
- p. 79
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 96-86
- Akron Series in Poetry
- pp. 92-93
Additional Information
ISBN
9781937378035
Related ISBN(s)
9781931968614
MARC Record
OCLC
794700444
Pages
91
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No