Bone Road in Word and Image

Geraldine Mills’ new collection, Bone Road in Word and Image, is a book length collection of lyric poems, combined with archival images from the US and Ireland, engaged with points where national and family history meet. Her imagination, like Emily Dickinson’s and Paul Celan’s, finds its most fertile ground in the smaller and tighter spaces that put the poet’s gifts under the most stress, and where diction, syntax, and technique must be at its most razor sharp. Mills’ short poems are brief narratives finely distilled, which engage with acts of erasure and suggestion that are central to the letter and the lyric. Each poem and image is a breath – of a human being, of a landscape, of hope, of return, of a diaspora–and is a moving, and beautifully crafted act of witness.