The Magpie and the Child tells a story of great loss, love, and learning. The volume starts from the days before the poetic journey, in a sort of pre-exploration of events before they were events, moving to and through the death of her child Emily at almost eleven years old from an unsuspected heart condition. The poems speak, lament, and sing among the metaphors and religious resonances that such mourning must inspire. The thieving magpie of the prefatory title poem pecks at its own image in the glass while the poet daubs the hope of intervening blood on the "trembling lintel of faith." The volume is filled with self-examination, suffering, remembered conversations with the living child, and very real ones with the dead, each of which record the steps of the emotional journey. The second half of The Magpie and the Child is an extended sequence taking the form of a fragmented diary, one that captures the pain of loss in a skeptical age yet insists on the ritual compensation of belief. In the rigors of its form, the depth of its despair, and the necessary belief in the meaning of its artistic act, Clutterbuck's poetry carefully and beautifully maintains this very delicate balance.
About the Author: Born in 1964, Catriona Clutterbuck grew up in a farming family in County Tipperary, close to the area where she now lives. She worked as a primary school teacher from the mid-1980s to the early '90s, before completing postgraduate studies in the University of Oxford. Her poems have been published in Boyne Berries; Crannóg; Cyphers; Oxford Poetry; Poetry Ireland Review;Staying Human: New Poems for Staying Alive (edited by Neil Astley, Bloodaxe, 2020); The Blue Nib;The Honest Ulsterman; Oxford Poets 2007: An Anthology (edited by David Constantine and Bernard O'Donoghue, Carcanet, 2007); The Kilkenny Anthology (edited by MacDara Woods, 1991); The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Poetry (edited by Seamus Heaney, 1993); The Steeple; Windows Authors and Artist Introductions Series (edited by Heather Brett, 1994); and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Ghosts in my Heels (South Tipperary Arts Centre and Start magazine), was published in 2005. She was the winner of the 1995 Richard Ellmann Prize (in association with Oxford Poetry) and her work was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions Readings in 2006. She teaches Irish literature at University College Dublin.