Audrey Molloy’s latest 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 gumtrees in her adopted home where plants are often not what they seem:
You are my ocean—
blue cocktail of salt and sediment—
but you are not my leaf.
While exploring ‘a closer understanding of what it means / to be a woman’ she displays a constant consciousness of the body and its desires.
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. In a dazzling variety of forms here are poems alert to imagination and alive to language itself.
The Gallery Press recently launched The Blue Cocktail at O’Connell House in Dublin.
Sydney-based poetry press, Pitt Street Poetry, published an Australia/New Zealand edition of The Blue Cocktail in October 2023. This edition is available to purchase via their website and in poetry-loving bookshops in Australia.
Audrey Molloy’s curious sensuality makes even the difficult moments deeply pleasurable.
— Martina Evans, The Irish Times
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
Reviews and Interviews
Interview with Seán Rocks on RTE Arena
Review by Stephen Sexton in The Irish Times
For Ireland / UK-based review copies of The Blue Cocktail, please contact the publisher at: books [at] gallerypress [dot] com. For review copies in Australia, contact Pitt Street Poetry at: psp [at] pittstreetpoetry [dot] com.
Praise for The Blue Cocktail
Themes are impressively interwoven, linking water and continents to nativity and womanhood. These poems are elegantly dressed and convivial . . . A quickening, intercontinental book.
—Stephen Sexton, The Irish Times