The Fado House - Mary Noonan

The manuscript of The Fado House was awarded the Listowel Poetry Collection Prize in June 2010. Mary Noonan's debut collection of poems The Fado House introduces a poet of real achievement and great promise. Her poems may be characterised by an intense musicality and a determinedly outward look, the range of the work (poems inspired by music, by visual art, by myth, by time abroad, and by the magic of family, friendships and love) always matched by the telling details of credible experience. Poems which treat of the loss of loved ones are handled with sensitivity, and her most affecting personal moments seem echoed in her translations of Baudelaire and de Nerval which further expand the reach of a book whose dominant tones are those of wonder and celebration.