The Fires

M. F. McAuliffe

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The Fires is about two fires: the burning city of Troy and the almost constantly burning megafire of the present. It's also about the beauty and fragility of the world we live in, human voices and concerns, the passing of time. It's a sequence that becomes a mosaic.

One layer down from the surface landscape, The Fires is also about the landscape of South Australia, the hills and beaches surrounding Adelaide, and its marginal, drought-prone mid-north plains. "Odysseus" is an implicit continuation and argument with writers Flexmore Hudson and Kenneth Slessor.

But after all the tragedy, cruelty, politics, love and arguments with its ancestors, The Fires is about being human in a world in which non-human beings, larger gods and forces, and beauty and utter frailty also live.

Plus: auto-fiction, "Hollywood, Guido Orlando, the Pope and the Mother" - which shows the connections and disjunctions between Old Hollywood (in the person of fixer and PR man Guido Orlando) and a former Pope, and the effects on a mother and daughter on the far side of the world. It is the story of a marriage, disjunction and alliance within a family, of what is nurtured and what is not, and of the power of politics and finance to reach into the lives of everyone.

Book Details

Publisher: Gobq LLC
Publish Date: Dec 13rd, 2024
Pages: 100
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 6.00in - 4.00in - 0.27in - 0.18lb
EAN: 9798888965443
Categories: • Subjects & Themes - Animals & Nature• Subjects & Themes - Death, Grief, Loss• Women Authors

About the Author

McAuliffe, M. F.: - M. F. McAuliffe was born and educated in South Australia and Victoria, has an Honours degree in English from Flinders University and a Graduate Diploma of Art from Swinburne College of Technology. She has worked as an English instructor in high schools and Technical Colleges in South Australia and Victoria, and in film and print libraries in Melbourne, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.Her fiction and poems have appeared in The Clarion Awards, Overland, Australian Short Stories, Prairie Schooner, Poezija (Zagreb), Thraca (Athens), The Writing Disorder, Unlikely Stories Mark V, and other print and online venues.In May 2000, her long poem "Orpheus" the libretto for the La Mama (Melbourne) production "Orpheus, an Australian Tragedy" at the Courthouse Theatre, Carlton. (Music by Melbourne composer Dindy Vaughan.) Her poem "Crucifix I" appeared in the Yoko Ono installation "Arising" in the Reykjavik Art Museum, 2016-2017. She is co-author of the poetry collection Fighting Monsters (with Judith Steele) and the limited edition artist's book, Golems Waiting Redux (with Portland, Oregon artist and sculptor Daniel Duford). She is author of The Crucifixes and Other Friday Poems, 25 Poems on the Death of Ursula K. Le Guin, the novella Seattle and the story cycle I'm Afraid of Americans.A long-time resident of Portland, Oregon, she is co-founder and co-editor of the Portland-based, completely multilingual journal Gobshite Quarterly (2002- ). In 2008 she co-founded its offshoot press, Reprobate/GobQ Books, where she edits and co-edits collections of poetry and fiction.

Praise for this book

In The Fires, McAuliffe has created a selection of poetry that cannot be set down. With her birds that make one feel the real possibility of flight, this collection sings. All that could be asked for is more of this remarkable poet.

- Sally K Lehman, author, The Last Last Fight and In The Fat

In The Fires, her allusion-rich and deeply lyrical new collection, M. F. McAuliffe's poems ask the questions that must be asked. They tell the truths that must be spoken. In oracular cadence, the title poem declares " the future is here / and it's more sunlight than you can bear / overlaid on sorrow // a pillar of tears / a waterfall of salt." While acknowledging - without flinching, without euphemism - our world's "complex futility," these poems also embrace our world's complex beauty, aspiring to "walk in the bright underbelly of the stars." McAuliffe's nuanced, powerful work does both.

- Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, author, The Voluptuary and My Kindred

Sip slowly. These poems, like all powerful elixirs, are distilled to their clearest potency. In these sparse verses, McAuliffe stares with deep attention at the wonder of changing seasons outside while staring deeply inward at our human condition of disconnection and dispossession. Take your time and let each of these poems burn through your heart. She's lighting the fire so you, reader, can see yourself more clearly.

- Armin Tolentino, Poet Laureate Emeritus, Clark County, author, We Meant to Bring It Home Alive

The Fires is a jazzy read. From the imagistic pulse to the rhetorical throb, from startling devastation to the richness of what is hidden from view, and from the classical to the profane, these poems behold the obscene with the rare, the junkyard with the unattainable relic, all while circling over the helpless griefs of the early 21st century.

- David Biespiel, author, Republic Café and The Book of Men and Women

In The Fires M. F. McAuliffe's prowess is on full display. Ablaze with a line of masterful metaphors and imagery, these poems stimulate the mind and tug at the heart. Whether by her discernment, humility, confession, tragedy, or beautiful earthiness, readers will find themselves captivated.

- Emmett Wheatfall, author, First Among Beautiful Stars and Contradictions from an Uncertain Silence