About “Blue Abundance”

These poems are astonishing in their strength – the vigour of unjaded senses, the generosity of a mature heart. Without condescension and without glib reassurance, they offer that strength in the forms of an achieved, at times transcendent art.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Noël Hanlon’s voice embodies luminous presence. Whether speaking so keenly and clearly of land she loves in Oregon and Ireland, conversations with neighbours and family, the raising of lambs, planting, nurturing, and harvesting, all the layers of a precious life and world – these are marvellous poems we could live in. They are that deep and that wide.
~ Naomi Shihab Nye

This is powerful love poetry; the painful and sometimes durable love achieved between humans – saucy, erotic, candid and funny… and it also has grand, ironic compassion for the earth and the living things that inhabit it in their fleeting way: hens milling about, sheep nurtured to be readied for slaughter, spiders weaving apparitions among the plants, the darkness thundering beneath. They tell one woman’s life stories from the broad fields of Oregon to the landscapes of Clare and Conamara. A would-be recluse within the warm family, a traveller poised for flight but with her arms in the clay and her poet’s passionate eye burrowing into what’s beyond…these are rich and disciplined weavings: tart in places, crisp and surprising, calm, questioning, sorrowing, truthful and sensual. The work of a proper legislator.
~ Lelia Doolan