Where Shadow Falls by Ruth O'Callaghan

Where Shadow Falls explores the frailties of the human condition, the landscapes in which such frailties emerge, and the dire consequences that can ensue.

The language and structure of the poems allows readers to create their own interpretations of events and relationships. Never didactic and often leavened with wit, the poems occupy the liminal space between what’s present and what lies beyond. Nevertheless, they are attentive in their range to such present-day realities as prostitution, prison and political deception. Forgiveness, they discover, may be found in time or place but we can only be ‘…certain that all is other in these uncertain times.’

Praise for Ruth O’Callaghan

‘Sharp and compassionate, not in any easy general way, but through an understanding of what confronts us in both nature and our lives, the language beautifully heard,
packed and measured’ — George Szirtes

‘I have read through the manuscript [of Vortices] amazed and aghast. These are poems that confront the worst that life has to show and to tell us with a dedication to truths most of us never have the courage to face up to. Only a poet, and probably only a woman poet who has looked unflinchingly at the extremes of evil and yet retained faith in an ultimate good, could have written them’ — Anne Stevenson

Two Rivers Press