Savage Solitude is an unusual and challenging book, taking the reader on an unflinching journey through the experience of being alone. Intimate, empathetic and dramatic, this is not so much a study as a total immersion into the ‘happenings in the head of a reluctant loner’.
Through quotations from a wide range of writers, poets and philosophers, the book contemplates an answer to the question, more pressing than ever in our hi-tech, interconnected world, of how to be alone – its absences, its horrors, and its possibilities.
“Medbh’s magic is to remind us... that life is a performance, and that creatively describing it requires a form of action, linguistic or physical or both.”
Books Ireland
Máighréad Medbh was born in Co. Limerick. A poet, her most recent collections are When the Air Inhales You (2009) and Twelve Beds for the Dreamer (2011), both published by Arlen House. Her work also appears in Poetry Ireland Review, Orbis, The Stinging Fly and Southword, as well as in several anthologies, including Salmon: A Journey in Poetry (Salmon Poetry, 2007). She was one of the pioneers of performance poetry in Ireland in the 1990s, and currently works in the public library service. She lives in Swords, Co. Dublin.