Beneath the Deluge by Catherine M Brennan
Excerpt (Download)
Prize winning poet Catherine M Brennan was born in Dublin and now lives in London. In this, her debut collection, she brings together her finest work: fresh, distinctive and honed with an eye for form and an ear for exact language.
Praise for Brennan’s poetry
Beneath the Deluge is a deliciously sensuous first collection, exploring the nature, both physical and metaphorical, of earth and water, drought and flood. In powerfully physical and resonant imagery, water floods, courses, thunders, slants and bubbles through the poems, sweeping the reader along an elemental, passionate, but always beautifully balanced and controlled journey. This is writing which lodges in the body, under the skin and in the senses, ‘rich with the scents/of crushed coriander, hot peanut oil/incense rising above traffic fumes.’ Pound urged poets to ‘Make it New;’ Catherine Brennan has achieved this in a body of work which urges us to reflect on our relationships with nature, with catastrophe, with memory, and with our own bodies.
Catherine Smith