Overview

How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net is a work of hybrid lyric-essay by Ellen Dillon that moves between elegy, translation, and ecological witness, finding its gravitational centre in a pencil sketch by Barrie Cooke of two figures hauling a pike from a boat on Lough Gur. From that image, the book spirals outwards: into Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, into the Irish-language poetry of Seán Ó'Ríordáin and the sustained presence of Fanny Howe, into questions of what is lost or hardened when Irish metaphor is rendered into English, and into the changing condition of the lakes themselves. The book's form is restless and self-aware, moving between prose meditation, collaged verse, close etymological reading, and a composite poem that interweaves Ó'Ríordáin and Howe's own words, while remaining anchored throughout in the physical particularities of lakeshore, birdsong, and weather.

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9781917617840

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Reviews

This is a joy. Ellen Dillon's line is lucid, dialectic, erudite-humanly so-and extraordinarily evocative. - Randolph Healy How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net is an extraordinary inquiry into the shared ecologies of human consciousness. In this 'abstract space made of mind' Dillon documents the complex processes of a 'mind that is out there among - making itself out of - the things of the world.' Poetry, parenthood, ekphrasis, translation, and the collapse of ecosystems all converge in the act of writing itself. Here is a speaker that exists in and through acts of writing, in a world where composition and what you are 'compounded of' are one and the same. This is a book that eludes categorization, as the best writing always does. What emerges is a work of such sheer originality and brilliance that it must surely confirm Dillon as one of the most exceptional poets of her generation. - Leeanne Quinn Dillon is a poet of the elemental, of the pastoral, of the ecological with an eye on the archives of some of her most sacred oracles. Incisive and fluent, she moves in her studies somewhere between the earth and the heavens, between past and present, and into the kerning where meaning itself lurks, ready to be excavated. This collection is an achievement by a careful and diligent scholar of poetry, of language itself and of the world in all its vagueness and vagaries. We can trust her metaphors, we can trust her lakes and landscapes which she renders for us as real as any world we can bravely inhabit. This is a collection that is ancient and timeless, respectful and reparative, like the writing eye of Dillon herself. How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net is a capstone moment in a writing life that is reaching out towards something greater than literature, something more resonant than art, something akin to infinity. - Liz Quirke

Author Information

Ellen Dillon is a poet and teacher from Limerick, Ireland. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Prototype Prize for artists and writers working at the intersections of different literary and artistic forms, and was Arts Council of Ireland Writer in Residence at University College Cork in 2025. She has published books on the life and work of Fernand Deligny, the history of butter in Ireland, Stephen Malkmus's guitar, Stéphane Mallarmé's teaching career, and the ghost of Townes Van Zandt.

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