The Blue Cocktail

The Blue Cocktail (paperback)
The Blue Cocktail (paperback)
Paperback B format 128 x 198 mm. 88 pages. Full colour cover.
ISBN 978-1-922776-10-5.
Price: A$28.00
Postage :

Audrey Molloy’s second collection probes ideas of home across her native Ireland and Australia, where she now lives. The ‘pure sheen’ of a horse chestnut makes way for the ‘minty scent’ of gum trees in her adopted home where the sea is reassuringly familiar but plants are often not what they seem:

You are my ocean—

blue cocktail of salt and sediment—

but you are not my leaf.

In a dazzling variety of forms, these poems reflect Molloy’s transnational identity as an Irish woman living in Australia and the tension and dialogue that exists between two cultures. One part memory, two parts love letter to the sea, with dashes of longing, sass and a nip of melancholia, The Blue Cocktail is strange, sexy and intoxicating.

Ordinary Time

Ordinary Time (paperback)
Ordinary Time (paperback)
Paperback B format 128 x 198 mm. 90 pages. Full colour cover.
ISBN 978-1-922080-13-4.
Price: A$28.00
Postage :

“I don’t know if I can tell you the truth. What if truth were prismatic, everyone looking through fruit-coloured panes?”

So begins a conversation between two people who have never met. Join Anthony Lawrence and Audrey Molloy on a lyrical journey through time and space, exploring themes of impermanence, distance, extinction, friendship and love, through the natural and imagined landscapes of time travel.

 

Reviews

‘In Ordinary Time, two poets explore what it means to take on ‘the shape of curiosity’, the ‘prismatic’ truth of things. Then they allow us to eavesdrop. Delightful. Written in a form that evokes unsteady pillars but also the sudden sight of a murmuration, these poems range far but always bring us home.’

Helen Mort, author of The Illustrated Woman (Chatto & Windus, 2022, shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection)

Audrey Molloy

Audrey Molloy grew up in Ireland and has lived in Sydney since 1998. Her debut collection, The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021) received the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. Ordinary Time, a collaboration with Australian poet Anthony Lawrence, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2022 and was one of Australian Book Review’s ‘Books of the Year 2022’. Audrey has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Manchester Metropolitan University. She was shortlisted for the Red Room Fellowship in 2022 and has previously been awarded a Varuna Residential Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in Best of Australian Poems, Australian Poetry Anthology, Island, Meanjin, Cordite, Overland and The Weekend Australian. 

‘This mature and grounded voice, unafraid to expose the fragility and vulnerability that come with life’s experiences, is suffused with human warmth that connects with and engages the reader.’ – Ella Jeffery, Marjon Mossammaparast, and Marcella Polain, 2021 Anne Elder Award