The View from Here

by Sara Berkeley

‘. . . and into the stillness / comes my
we carry our daughters until they are too light to bear,
then we carry our mothers; they are heavy as air.'

‘I loved my life with a fierce joy,’ Sara Berkeley proclaims in her follow up to Strawberry Thief, a book singled out by Dermot Bolger for its ‘extraordinarily vivid freshness and sharp focus’ by ‘a unique and crystal clear Irish voice’.

Since she published her first collection Sara Berkeley has been a distinctive, vibrant witness to the way people live. The View from Here is a compendium of her observations. Her ‘habit of laughter / in the face of despair / will not be broken’, because her tremulous, sensual poetry is built around a strong backbone. Again and again she finds reasons ‘to march down Main Street / in your boots with your trumpet / and your heart in a suitcase’.

Whether she considers Ireland from afar or her adopted California home, night horses or her young daughter, ‘How It Will End’ or a beloved local cinema where ‘when the lights go down . . . the music wears its white dress down the aisle’, these bewitching poems resonate with thrilling details and surprise.

71 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Sara Berkeley was born in Dublin in 1967. She lives in California. She has published five collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a novel.