Her Father's Daughter

In Nessa O'Mahony's third poetry collection, she examines the nature of those bonds through poems that combine the autobiographical with the historical. Nessa presents a parallel sequences of poems, one relating to her relationship with her own father, whose decline and death she charts with painful honesty, the second exploring the life of her grandfather, a more mysterious figure whose story slowly emerges through her mother's memories, and her own research. The result is a meditation on love and losing, and on what is retained through narrative and memory.