The poetry of Mary O'Malley alludes to and shares form with music--the music of Ireland, the Iberian peninsula, and American jazz. Her themes embrace the child colonized and the adult journey; a poetry exploring love, place, and loss; and the poet's one true home in language. Included are works drawn from her previous previous collections, including Where the Rocks Float, The Knife in the Wave, and Asylum Road.

Valparaiso is a book of poems begun at sea on an Irish research ship on which Mary O'Malley was a resident poet. It is a book of searches and discoveries. As the scientists chart a course dictated by the demands of their own researches, as Ireland is careering from boom into bust, Mary O'Malley explores the science of going under and staying afloat. What are the effects of such transformations on the imagination? A key poem, 'Out', escapes from the creative lockdown that the Irish boomtime entailed. She returns to an altered place, and is herself changed by an odyssey that has taken her around the Atlantic and Europe to a kind of homecoming.

Joint Winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2018. In Playing the Octopus, her eighth collection of poems, Mary O'Malley's sensitivity to the spirit of Ireland's west coast is as attuned as ever. In a world both earthen and dreamlike, bodily and mythical, a trout is seen to 'swallow light through his skin', a wolf 'howls the great open vowel of his need', and in the emptiness where a tree once stood, 'a tree-shaped brightness dances'. Over the course of the collection, O'Malley twins the Irish west coast with the American east coast, Inis Mor with Coney Island, the parish with the metropolis, the pipes with the axe, each offering its own comfort and wonder. Sylvia Plath, Lois Lane and Antigone feature in an unlikely cast of heroines through which O'Malley tests the mythologies of motherhood and femininity ('no mother is ever good enough until she's dead', writes the poet, with characteristic wit). Playing the Octopus is a body of writing buoyed by the redemptive power and sustaining joy of music, and it closes with O'Malley's translations of the Irish poet Sean O Riordain and the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca.

The poems in Mary O'Malley's new collection focus on legal separation: of Northern from Southern Ireland, of written Irish from its original script, and of husband from wife. The book explores a season in hell when the verities vanish, the love we live by dies, and the ramparts that shore up our existence are demolished. A marriage breaks down, children leave home, love itself is questioned. What is home now? Where is it? And how do we live when we cannot return? The personal is examined through the lens of the greater human chaos. This is a book about eviction, an examination of the nature of home that is both private and political, written out of a sense of the barbarism that threatens to overwhelm the deep song of Ireland.

Imagine for a moment that you had no pressures in your life-no problems to fix, no deadlines to meet, no struggles to overcome. Do you feel that sense of spacious relief? It's not an illusion, teaches Mary O'Malley. It really is possible to live with that profound openness all the time, even while tending to your everyday tasks and obligations. In What's in the Way Is the Way, Mary offers practical guidance for meeting all of your experience with an abiding sense of ease, trust, and peace of mind. This accessible book is divided into ten phases, featuring inspiring wisdom and step-by-step exercises to heal the core beliefs that keep you stuck. With each chapter, Mary invites you to come into the present and see yourself and your circumstances in a different way-unclouded by preconceptions, struggle, or fear. Join her on this illuminating journey to discover: * How fear controls our lives-untangling the conditioning that keeps us from trusting our complete experience * The healing power of curiosity-a natural way to meet our lives without needing to change or judge anything * Trusting what happens even when we feel threatened, ashamed, or afraid * Why we become more active, engaged, and effective when we stop "doing" life and start being fully present for our lives * Remembering exercises-simple, powerful practices for reconnecting with our natural state of curiosity, trust and love "No object, person, or experience will ever bring you the deep and lasting peace that comes from simply being open to life," writes Mary. With What's in the Way Is the Way, this renowned teacher brings you a powerful guide for turning your obstacles into your greatest allies and teachers-and showing up for your life with all your vulnerability, passion, and magnificent perfection.

What is time? Our understanding of it changes, between when the angels rejoiced at the incarnation to when Einstein and then Feynman reconceived it. In the strange, unregulated and disorienting world of the web we experience it in new ways, its predictabilities wrested from us. In Mary O'Malley's Demeter and Persephone sequence, time is experienced through generations, but the new gods play differently and spin the clock hands in their own mischievous ways. New generations find the time-patterns and expectations of their predecessors arcane and incomprehensible, and vice versa. Through mythology and ecology, this book sets out to restore connections. The book opens with oranges orbiting a winter kitchen. Time in its dozen guises moves through the poems, as does fate. Mary O'Malley was appointed 2019 Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

Belonging to Life is an exploration of becoming awake and present for our lives so that we can know - no matter what we are experiencing, the joy and peace that are our birthright. Through stories, ideas and techniques, it explores how to quiet our minds and open our hearts so we can truly belong to ourselves and to life. Mary O'Malley writes from her own personal experience of awakening, having walked through the darkest of times, transmuting pain and wounding into precious treasure.

The Magical Forest of Aliveness is a wonderfully wise story which equips the inner child with metaphors to open the way for awakening to one's true nature. It's a sweet, simple, and wise poetic journey into human awakening that calms the mind, warms the heart, and speaks directly to the soul. A marvelous tale about the "stuff no one ever told us," but that would have changed our lives if they had.