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 launchedThe 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
- Review by Emer Lyons in Poetry Ireland Review
- Interview with Maisy Stapleton on Eastside Radio’s Thursday Arts Program
- Review by Rowena Sommerville in The High Window
- Review by Sam Ryam in Australian Book Review (ABR)
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
Resonant and luminous, Audrey Molloy’s The Blue Cocktail considers bodies and their politics beside bodies of water, home and abroad, “where the water is brackish,/not one thing nor another – the emigrant’s curse”.
— Stephen Sexton,The Irish Times Best New Poetry Books of 2023
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
Although Molloy now lives in Sydney, this book is deeply rooted in the traditions of Irish poetry. A second full collection, in many ways it has the form of a first collection, tracing the author’s origin story and being primarily biographical. The Blue Cocktail is also a collection of ecological thought, concerned with the nature of the world and of the self.
— Emer Lyons, Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 141
The Blue Cocktail has a lot to offer – skills, observation, insight and passion – and I’m grateful to have had the chance to read it and to pay it the attention that it surely deserves.
— Rowena Sommerville, The High Window, May 2024
Molloy’s voice is so strong that by the time you finish the collection you may feel as though you know the poet intimately.
I am taken with the ease of Molloy’s voice. Not once did I have to reread a line or stop to try and find the poems’ melodies. Throughout the collection, complexity stalks her command of rhythm.
The Blue Cocktail skilfully links identity to place.
— Sam Ryan, Australian Book Review, June 2024, no.465