The Poison Colour

by Maureen Hynes

The poems of The Poison Colour, Maureen Hynes's fourth collection, while moving onto more experimental ground than her previous works, retain her strong, personal voice. Looking through "the peepshow of the past," she finds the essential question: what makes us human. Beads from a broken necklace, a rosary, bounce down the centuries to link Hynes's mother's life with women's lives from earliest times. In our cities, traces of forgotten places and people: like the artists of the arte povera movement, Hynes attends to the "poor materials" of daily life, whether intimate or public - plywood and concrete, tarpaulin and wool, clay and asphalt. What poisons us? What enlivens us? Can one element do both? Here "the elements shift from breath to roar, warmth to sear, solid to quake. Consolation to destruction."

Genres: Poetry

89 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2015

About the author

As a poet, editor and educator, Maureen believes that good art is like a flamenco dance -- urgent, passionate, brilliant! It wakes us up, opens us up and makes us more aware.

A primary principle for her own work is for it to be holistic – that it intensely engage cognition, our senses and our emotions, which are such mysterious masters and servants in our lives, but which also form the constellation that makes us human.

"My poetry," says Maureen, "is always an attempt to go deeper, mostly into a lot of commonplace experiences, situations or vistas to find the still moment where a small connection or realization can be made, hopefully with poetic grace. Sort of like following a thread into the underworld, and not always possible until well after the experience.”

Reviews

[Eaton Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a significant fan of Maureen Hynes' work. She writes from the interstices between personal and public, pain and solace with a tough and tender touch; as you move from poem to poem you'll be changed, a little, rearranged. Recommended.

[Lynn Tait · Rating 4 out of 5]

The praise for Maureen Hynes and her book The Poison Colour by Rachel Rose on the back cover says it all. Beautifully visual poems (some fabulously ekphrastic). the effect is blue, not periwnkle; the entire sections:A Thousand Stones; The Poison Colour. - a beautiful book of poems.