The Half-Said Things

Miriam O'Neal's The Half-Said Things is a book both meditatively considerate and bitingly eloquent. These are domestic poems on the edge of wilderness, poems from empty rooms in crowded houses, poems delighting in language and ripe with depth. "So I take my missing with me like a parting / gift of roses" she writes, reflecting lyrically on life and death from a calm, wisely wary place of earned experience, strength and knowing acceptance.

- Stephan Delbos, Poet Laureate of Plymouth, Massachusetts



I loved Miriam O'Neal's The Half-Said Things for its wondrous questioning and its listening "to the songs a shy girl hears." These are poems grounded in the world where yeasty dough is kneaded in "a red ware bowl the size of a small country." This is a country with a "muffin god" and a "wet wheat ocean," where the speaker is a "fugitive of her own heart." In this place, we enter churches, as well as rooms with cabbage roses on the wallpaper. O'Neal asks, "Whose world is this?/Whose world these?" This collection is a discovery of truths, which can be stark: ". . .only hunger and sea wind/only song and sway mean/anything." I'll return to this place in The Half-Said Things where I am reminded to "Be kind. We are only here so long."

- Jennifer Martelli, author of My Tarantella



Miriam O'Neal's poems draw one deeply into a bodily experience where all senses are evoked. In the tradition of the great Irish female poet Eavan Boland, who championed the way for women to write poems about their own lives, domesticity, and the landscape within the home, she speaks to the present, to symbol, and to memory through everyday language. There is bread and rain. There are birds and song. A seamstress of words, O'Neal's Irish heritage weaves through this collection as in these beautiful deeply moving lines from her first poem, 'still life with knowledge,' which could also describe her style: no more than a hum of notes/ from songs her mother's sung/ before, a lullaby about losing love, and though/ she hasn't lost anything yet, she understands. 

- Attracta Fahy, Author of Dinner in the Fields