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.
Audrey Molloy’s curious sensuality makes even the difficult moments deeply pleasurable.
— Martina Evans, The Irish Times