Binding: Hardback
Date Published: 17 Sep 2025
Tidal is the second poetry collection by west of Ireland poet Karen J McDonnell. Her poems explore the tropes and roles we impose on memory and history: what we commemorate, what we choose to remember, how age affects viewpoints. McDonnell is interested in how form — and also erasure and found poems — can be used in approaching historical events and biographical themes; excavating both universal and personal responses to our tiny, huge, lonely, ugly, beautiful world.
'Karen McDonnell's Tidal is a glorious treasure trove of poems celebrating the ebb and flow of life in all its precarious fullness. Intimate and expansive in language and subject matter, these poems give voice, real and imagined, to what is often hidden or overlooked - a gem of a collection.'
Anne Tannam, author of dismantle (Salmon Poetry)
'These poems flow like water, lapping the banks of time and memory, sometimes deliberately hesitant, more often sinuous and fluid. Ancestors come and go here, prefiguring and embodying the writing witness. Other lives flow into and out of consciousness - mother and lover, murdered women and long-obscured servants - and the language of the poems is a mirror to, an enchantment shared with the confident considering self, standing like a rock in the stream. You must give these poems all the time they have earned and deserve.'
Theo Dorgan, author of Once Was A Boy (Dedalus Press)