Stone Girl, Mary Noonan’s second collection of
poems, is preoccupied with stone statues of women – the statue of the Virgin at
Granard (beside which Ann Lovett died), the statue of the Virgin carried
through the streets of Seville to the bullring on Easter Sunday morning, the
caryatids seeming to carry the buildings of Paris on their shoulders,
Pygmalion’s statue of a woman that comes to life…
The book navigates between the author’s
native Cork and Paris, frequenting the ghosts found in both place and discovering
in the process that the borders between the living and the dead are porous.