The Book of Kells by Barbara Crooker Hardback Book 9781532606380

Barbara Crookers eighth book of poetry The Book of Kells focuses on the illuminated medieval manuscript with a series of meditations on its various aspects from the ink and pigments used by the scribes and illustrators to the various plants animals and figures depicted on its pages including the punctuation and use of decoration in the capital letters It also contains poems on the flora and fauna of Ireland swans hares magpies fuchsia gorse crocosmia etc that Crooker encountered during writing residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan The third thread in this volume is a series of glosas a fifteenthcentury Spanish form that incorporates a quatrain from other poems here Irish writers Yeats Heaney ODriscoll provide the embedded lines In her work Crooker considers the struggle to pin lines to the page to tie experience to the written word to wrestle between faith and doubt to accept the aging body as it tries to be fully alive in the world Crooker contrasts the age of faith when the Book of Kells was created to our modern age of doubt and uses as her foundation the old stones of Irish myth and lore from preChristian times She juxtaposes a time when the written...