In this collection of poems by Paul O’Prey, the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a flat-earth pilgrim’s map from the thirteenth century, is the starting point for these poems of exploration and discovery, and for finding our place in the modern world.
‘Paul O’Prey’s beautifully designed chapbook from The Melos Press contains a mapping of the poet’s dealings with the world, though every step taken through the outer topography has a powerful resonance with the life within. The epigraph from Rilke’s Duino Elegies nudges the reader in this direction: ‘The world is nowhere, my love, if not within.’ […] This is such a skilfully structured book of just sixteen poems, yet its lightness of touch belies the heights and depths of its journeying.’
– Martyn Crucefix (full review here)
‘These exquisitely-conceived poems penetrate to the heart of our world and of every world. They take the reader through time and space, the natural and supernatural, in their taut, “tight-rigged” language, at times visionary, questioning, always wise. Images of the sea, its ships, wrecks, coastlines abound and link the poems together. In his quietly assured, honed voice, Paul O’Prey unsettlingly parallels with today the extended metaphor of the “flat-circle earth” and its dangerous edges, where even “gravity seems suddenly uncertain.”‘
– Patricia McCarthy
‘Triggered by an encounter with the 13th century Mappa Mundi these precisely observed and eloquent poems explore the melding of inner and outer worlds so instinctive to the mediaeval map-makers but more challenging for the modern sensibility. From the south coast of England, where a lost ship scuttled in the war by the poet’s father is now “a broken reef rusting on the channel floor”, to the mountainous heights of Mallorca where the Tramontana wind “cuts,/ like truth told in anger”, the poet probes and searches for signs of human hope among maritime landscapes, his poised attention “ready/ to drink and be new.’
– Nicholas Murray
Published by The Melos Press
ISBN: 9781739489717
24 pp
