“Noel Hanlon’s voice embodies luminous presence. Whether speaking so keenly and clearly of land she loves in Oregon and Ireland, conversations with neighbours and family, the raising of lambs, planting, nurturing and harvesting all the layers of a precious life and world - these are marvellous poems we could live in. They are that deep and that wide.”
Naomi Shihab Nye
“These poems are astonishing in their strength - the vigor of unjaded senses, the generosity of a mature heart. Without condescension and without glib reassurance, they offer that strength in the forms of an achieved, at times transcendent art.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“This is powerful love poetry; the painful and sometimes durable love achieved between humans - saucy, erotic, candid and funny... rich and disciplined weavings: tart in places, crisp and surprising, calm, questioning, sorrowing, truthful and sensual. The work of a proper legislator.”
Lelia Doolan
Noel Hanlon was born in Portland, Oregon in 1956. She lives on a 30-acre farm, where she and her husband raise sheep, chickens and every variety of plant and vegetable possible in the Oregon climate. Noel began writing seriously in 1994 when she attended the Flight of the Mind workshop on the McKenzie River in Oregon. Her poems have been published in the US and she is a member of a small poetry group which comprises several inspirational writers, including Ursula Le Guinn, Molly Gloss and Judith Barrington. She is on the board of Soapstone, an Oregon residency that provides women writers with a stretch of uninterrupted time for their creative work, and the opportunity to live in semi-solitude in the natural world. Noel herself lives this dream; her own poetry is born out of her relationships with the people, landscapes and animals, tame and wild, of her native Oregon.
Naomi Shihab Nye
“These poems are astonishing in their strength - the vigor of unjaded senses, the generosity of a mature heart. Without condescension and without glib reassurance, they offer that strength in the forms of an achieved, at times transcendent art.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“This is powerful love poetry; the painful and sometimes durable love achieved between humans - saucy, erotic, candid and funny... rich and disciplined weavings: tart in places, crisp and surprising, calm, questioning, sorrowing, truthful and sensual. The work of a proper legislator.”
Lelia Doolan
Noel Hanlon was born in Portland, Oregon in 1956. She lives on a 30-acre farm, where she and her husband raise sheep, chickens and every variety of plant and vegetable possible in the Oregon climate. Noel began writing seriously in 1994 when she attended the Flight of the Mind workshop on the McKenzie River in Oregon. Her poems have been published in the US and she is a member of a small poetry group which comprises several inspirational writers, including Ursula Le Guinn, Molly Gloss and Judith Barrington. She is on the board of Soapstone, an Oregon residency that provides women writers with a stretch of uninterrupted time for their creative work, and the opportunity to live in semi-solitude in the natural world. Noel herself lives this dream; her own poetry is born out of her relationships with the people, landscapes and animals, tame and wild, of her native Oregon.