The Speculations of Country People by Majella Kelly
The astonishing poetry debut exploring hidden histories, mythical landscapes and self-discovery in the face of limits on women's bodily autonomy.
In 2017, the presence of a mass grave was confirmed in a disused sewage system in Tuam, County Galway. In it were the bodies of infants - wards of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, where from 1925 to 1961 the children of unmarried women were sent to live their lives in the care of nuns. Their deaths were the result of a conservative culture which, under the influence of the Church, took a prurient interest in women's private lives and bodies.
In The Speculations of Country People, her hauntingly lyrical debut collection, Majella Kelly reckons with that legacy. She traces the journeys of women in our own day, from controlling relationships to sexual reawakening and new happiness. The speculations of the title are in part those of gossip, the chatter of small communities everywhere; but they are also those of a local, very Irish mythos, in which pagan and Christian - and truth and legend - blend and blur.
Here, then, are hares and selkies, a seductive 'master otter' of 'fabulous elegance' who might carry a woman away in the night; here is the last man on Omey Island; here a retired stuntman, dragging his bed of rusty nails along the beach. And here - quiet, against the beauty and loneliness of the Connemara landscape - are the little bones that wash up on shores or stick from the earth to speak of what has been.
About the Author
Majella Kelly is from Tuam, a small town in the West of Ireland. She is a multi-award-winning poet whose poetry has been widely published and anthologised. Her debut pamphlet ‘Hush’ was published in 2020 by Ignition Press and ten of her poems were published by Carcanet in the Brotherton Prize Anthology at the University of Leeds. In 2019 she won the Strokestown International Poetry Competition. In 2018 she won the Ambit Poetry Prize, came second in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted by The Irish Times for a Hennessy Literary Award. In 2017 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. In 2016 she came third in the Resurgence Eco Poetry Prize (now the Ginkgo Prize). She has been shortlisted for the Rialto Pamphlet Competition and the Listowel Poetry Collection Award. Her work has also been published in such places as The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, Ambit, The Well Review, Cyphers, Crannóg, The Rialto, Best New British & Irish Poets 2017, Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Annual and elsewhere. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from St Anne’s College at the University of Oxford.
Her debut poetry collection is ‘The Speculations of Country People’.
Praise for The Speculations of Country People
“This tenderly inquisitive book . . . oscillate[s] between an intimate interiority . . . and a powerful poetry of witness. Along with its strong, lyrical voice, the book's sections are held together by evocative personifications of the natural world . . . Kelly attends carefully to the histories she writes about . . . [The section on the Tuam Mother and Baby Home] is a poetic inquiry, where skilful and moving language is a tool of investigation. Kelly probes at difficult questions of religion, legacy, grief, and the responsibility of memory and memorial. The poems are lucid with their remembering . . . full of discovery, [The Speculations of Country People gifts] us with the wisdom that the list of places we are from is not fixed, but rather textured with the continuous possibility of finding home in new people and new places”
- Alycia Pirmohamed
“Majella Kelly offers so much: ecstatic lyricism, historical fiction, genealogy, cultural observation, emotional excavation and virtuosic skill. Her poems have drive, empathy, pathos and joy”
- Kathryn Maris
Publisher: Penguin
Date Published: 6 April, 2022
Paperback, 96 pages
ISBN: 9781802061727
