Liz Gallagher

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Biographical note:  Liz Gallagher was born and brought up in Donegal, Ireland. She has been living in Gran Canary Island for the past 14 years. She has an Education degree where she specialised in Irish language. She also has a Computer Science degree. She is at present doing research into online debating for her PhD. She began writing about 5 years ago and has won a variety of awards in both Ireland and the US: Best New Poet 2007 (Meridian Press, Virginia University) First Prize in The Listowel Writers’ Single Poem Competition 2009 and she was selected by Poetry Ireland for their 2009 Introductions Series in recognition of her status as an emerging poet.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715671
ISBN:  9781844715671
Author:  Liz Gallagher
Title:  The Wrong Miracle
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar. (Picasso)

Philosophical, inquisitive, humorous narratives show Gallagher’s talent for letting ideas be widely connotative – sharp and daring, quirky and knowing – these poems of wide-ranging themes and approaches are chock full of the unexpected, delivered in lively rhythms and tempo with an energy and way of seeing the world that is compelling.

Be the poems about an addiction to soap watching or searching for the ‘real’ flamenco to oddly philosophical glimpses into angels and bath time or Picasso and a sexual snap — these well-rounded poems are full of spark, moving one into seeing the grand significance in the mundane.

Darker angled poems zone in on death, on loneliness, on a graveyard visit, on war. These poems use original images to bring timely messages that are real and tangible.

A series of love poems incite gorgeous, off-centre views on love. Playfulness and tongue-in-cheek mix with sensuality and randomness, idioms catapult into surprises, there are implications and engaging twists and urgency.

From the cosmic to the domestic, from childhood flashback to adult matter-of-factness, from the simply chilling to the witty and authentic — cleverness and a surreal intensity entertain and enlighten, making Wrong Miracle an achievement of the amusing and the deep.

Gallagher is a poet of immense resource with a refreshingly original voice that will move one to exclaim – ‘Ah, what a great thing for poems to do!’

Table of contents:
Decorum
A Bruising on the Bone
Woman in a Red-Head
A Lady in the Bath with Angels
All This Wonderment
Here’s Me in an Anonymous Society
Spring
Breakfast Cereals, Picasso and a Sexual Snap
A Poem that Thinks It Has Joined a Circus
Finding the Right Silences
Compartmentalise
Look What the Cat Dragged In
Sunglasses
Prelude to Getting One’s Act Together
Rooster on a Dangerous Bend (Or There Is No Satisfaction in Losing One’s Hat)
Spring the Life Fandango
The Loneliness of Not Being Equivalent to the Other
Soaps
The Sun Splits
Second Thoughts on Sunday
Graveyard Visit (1)
Deposits in the Heart Region
Small Acts
Waking a Grandmother
My Father Shows Me How to Sharpen a Bush-Trimmer
A Guide to Enjoying a Wet August
Letter From a Far-Flung Place
Bogeyman at Play
A Bout of the Sinister in the Everyday
The Woman with All Her Curtains Drawn
Mostly, My Dogs Excel the Gods
‘Please Be Yous Good Till I Get Back!’
Sunday with Ritual
Episode iii: The Day the Shelling Started
Sun Over a Tree Line
City Roof Top
The Agony in the Garden
The Soldier Sways on a Swing: Episode XV
14 Seconds
Feet and Mouth and Shoes
Irreversible
Against the Odds, We Talk Ourselves into Things
Shuffling Feet in the Early Hours
In the Kitchen with Chestnuts and Tomatoes
Crazy Love
Falling Out of Love (or Remaining Untrained in Kite Flying)
Sing Me a Sort of Lily-the-Pink Song
Signs
Exposition of the Contents of a Heart
Small Consolation
Sometimes When You are Bent Over Chopping leeks …
The Wrong Miracle
Love Exists in the Back-Boiler Room
Allow Me
Search Me (All Else Failing)
In the Dark, Listening to Rain
Cosmic Noise
A Breeze in My Hair

Excerpt from book:  

Sun Over a Tree Line

I was buying a croissant when I saw
the execution photo. Sometimes we focus
on the explorer — the tangled weed inside

every Because they said so. Nerves can
be as frayed as a sofa. Faint hoof prints
take over and a last wish for a dictator

is a pedicure. Measures of change are
contained in names once held
in a cell phone — a baker missing,

a family, moved. A city under siege
is a Humpty Dumpty — its people grab
door handles and door frames collapse.

Moth-eaten fabric covers all wars.
A problem is dead bodies — blankets
waterlog, headlights turn off and it is

all about inching forward like thieves.
A mistake magnifies within its own
dimensions. Under the gaze of a camera,

there are epiphanies — God becomes
a ragged fellow who moves
from tree to tree in the back of the mind.

He pursues the living and the dead stay dead.

Unpublished endorsement:  Liz Gallagher's poems delight in the possibilities of language. They seize us from the first line and tug us along, startled and exhilarated by the tumbling originality of her use of words.

Laurie Smith
Magma

Unpublished endorsement:  Whether about an untranslated paragraph on shooting ducks or breakfast cereals, Picasso and a sexual snap, Liz Gallagher's poems are proof that everyday movements generate power and magic. The Wrong Miracle is the work of a master illusionist—a fusion of the surreal and the domestic, the strategic and the spontaneous—where perception is challenged and subtly reinvented.

Arlene Ang
The Pedestal Magazine

Unpublished endorsement:  These are poems that may surprise: sprinkled with humour and vivid word pictures. The verbal twists take you by a friendly matter-of-fact hand to show you other truths. Liz Gallagher owns a true poet’s eye for detail paired with a flair for oddly compelling juxtaposition. Her poetry wants to show you this other thing it has found, like a cat displaying its catch. (as in her poem) ‘Just look what the cat dragged in’.

Barry Harris
Tipton Poetry Journal

Unpublished endorsement:  Long lines with surprising phrases and rushing, tumbling images mark the narrative trend of Liz Gallagher’s poetry. The poems lean into the strength of these narratives, rely upon the poet’s willing experimentation with varietal voice, and in so doing, create a distinctive diction — one with introspective vision that bubbles out of earthy perception, like a choice mineral spring.

Eve Anthony Hanninen, Poet, Writer, Artist & Editor of The Centrifugal Eye