Dodder Daughter

<p>*They say when you turn sixty</p><p>you become invisible.</p><p>Try sixty millennia</p><p>of rising, trickling,</p><p>flowing, spurting,</p><p>curving bank sides*</p><p>Turning sixty and recovering from major surgery in the spring of 2024, <strong>Nessa O’Mahony</strong> returned to her beloved local river, the Dodder. As healing progressed, O’Mahony’s fascination for the river grew and she conceived of a plan, not only to map out its trajectory from source to sea, but to imagine a voice and personality for the river that has curved through south Dublin for millennia. That ambition grew into a wider exploration of the feminine in all its cycles, seen through the shifting dynamics of mother-daughter relationships and the wider landscape, and a growing sense of what is encroaching, what is at stake and what may be lost. The resulting poems brim with humane feeling, but also with a sardonic quiet wit that makes such moments clearly hard won.</p>