Westerly Rising by Paul O’Prey is a collection of poems exploring landscape, pilgrimage, history and myth, and the search for rootedness in a dislocated world.
Like the landscapes they explore, these poems are shaped by wind, tide, and human history. Oak trees surrender to the sea; a river is forced beneath city streets.
Running through the collection is a quest for rootedness in a dislocated world. Without a given destination, a pilgrim wanders the Tramuntana mountains of Mallorca, the ancient woodlands of Sussex, and the battered coast of County Down. There is no shrine. He puts his trust instead in close attention to the world as it is found, and to what history and myth reveal, as he turns to face the west wind — elemental harbinger of rain and change.
‘The salt-laden storm clouds blowing through Westerly Rising threaten our assumptions about our place in the world while proffering “new” ways of being. These fine poems — filled with islands, embarkations, shipwrecks and voyages — ask if we might let such powers “become [our] breath”.
O’Prey’s concerns are spiritual as much as ecological, imagining journeys in hope of connecting one to another. Here are poems following London’s long-buried River Fleet that offer us a grubby, urban, very English kind of “Camino” towards the sea. Others wrestle with the brute facts of mortality, yet the elegant architecture of this ultimately uplifting book returns us, via allusions to John Donne, William Blake and Thomas Merton, to a salvific vision, “believing in the being / by seeing something else”.’
— Martyn Crucefix
ISBN: 9781908527516
84 pages
Westerly Rising is published by Agenda Editions
