The Fado House

MARY NOONAN is an Irish poet and academic. She lives in Cork, and works as lecturer in French at University College Cork. Her poems have been published widely in print and online and poems have featured in The Alhambra Poetry Calendar (2010) and Best Irish Poetry 2010. In 2007, she was selected to take part in the Poetry Ireland Introductions series in Dublin and was invited to read at the Poetry Hearings festival in Berlin in 2009. 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.