Greg McBride

The Book of Kells

Arts & Literature

“It’s hard not to be startled by both the how of her rendering and the what of which she makes such music, something created by monks 1,400 years ago. This is thrilling stuff: ‘six hundred steps to the scriptoria / on rocks piled by the hand of God’ and the ‘castellated outcrops terrifying / above the brooding sea.’ And lizards slithering in the text, animals as punctuation, peacocks everywhere. ‘[A]n N made up of two wrestling men.’ She gives us that long ago Ireland, then today’s as seen through the feeling eyes of a poet on retreat. This book is a wonder, a departure from Crooker’s celebrated domestic work, and gloriously so.”