Results for "O'Reilley, Mary Rose"

Transcendence can come in many forms. For Mary Rose O'Reilley a year tending sheep seemed a way to seek a spirituality based not on "climbing out of the body" but rather on existing fully in the world, at least if she could overlook some of its earthier aspects. The Barn at the End of the World fol... Read More about The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd (World as Home)

Half Wild is spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O'Reilley's collection hangs on to life like the bee "up to his hips in love" who "will fall asleep in the snow" and "wake up still ki... Read More about Half Wild: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets)

In her new collection, Earth, Mercy, Mary Rose O'Reilley sifts through the debris of human habitation -- pink thong sandals, curlers, broken televisions -- looking for a kind of junkyard grace: "Holiness enters again / turquoise fins, and the Cessna's carapace / lifts on its wind." The first poem, "... Read More about Earth, Mercy (Sea Cliff Fund)

At midlife, Mary Rose O'Reilley writes, we are called to an "archaeology of memory"--turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there--to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. Excavating her own life, she traces the middle-class Irish American background that shaped her, with it... Read More about The Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology (World as Home)

It's 1923 and Annie O'Leary has made a rational and even beautiful life for herself on the back ward of a state asylum, where she's confined for a terrible crime she doesn't remember committing. She writes poetry, helps the nurses, and sings old hymns off the back porch. Then a new patient arrives t... Read More about Bright Morning Stars

At midlife, Mary Rose O'Reilley writes, we are called to an "archaeology of memory"--turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there--to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. Excavating her own life, she traces the middle-class Irish American background that shaped her, with it... Read More about The Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology