One Still Thing

In One Still Thing Nell Regan explores heart and landscape in this century and the last, from Santa Fe to Celbridge, Cork to the banks of the Mississippi and Paris to San Francisco. The book opens in urban and rural landscapes in contemporary Ireland and further afield, building to the sequence 'Thirty-Six Views of the Sugarloaf', prompted by Hokusai's Fuji woodcuts and capturing transitory moments occurring around and on this iconic Wicklow mountain. At the centre of the book is 'Passage', the story of the migration of an early 20th century Irish woman to the USA. From the Federal Gold Reserve to a shell factory in Iowa, tragic conflicts of work, love and fate take place. The final section is formed by a series of love poems which celebrate and chart the early months of a new relationship and turn on possible, imagined futures. Throughout the collection, changes in the material properties of glass, stone, tree and rain parallel transformations in the human body through illness, vocation and fertility, as geographic and emotional territories find points of contact and exchange.