Forest Music

Forest Music is Susan Connolly's second full-length collection. Many poems in the book depict Susan Connolly's personal encounter with her landscape. Living in Drogheda, close to the Boyne Valley, her poems celebrate the famous archaeological monuments of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange alongside local landmarks: the Maiden Tower, the seawall at Baltray and the discovery in a back garden of a cobbled garden dating from the early nineteenth century. Her recent work is more experimental in form. These poems involve a typography in which the visual pattern corresponds in some way to the sense of the word or phrase represented. Dissatisfied with words always moving from left to right across the page, in these poems words can be vertical instead of horizontal, and move in circles and spirals as the need dictates.