"Gerard Donovan is a man of two countries, teasing the beauty out of what lies in between.. born in Wexford and reared in Galway, he is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University. The author of two previous collections, Columbus Rides Again (Salmon, 1993) and Kings and Bicycles (Salmon, 1995), his poetry has appeared in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Sewanee Review, New Statesman, Stand, and the Irish Times. After a career playing classical guitar in the eighties, he currently works as a professor in New York."

Loud puffins ring the rock.
We pick our steps from air,
every inch planted with pilgrimage.
Feet have crowded centuries here.

This high, even the sea is stone:
like a flower grown from it, sky leans
sapphire out of salt green,
blooming among the beehive huts.

They lived in brilliant cold,
chipped at a monstrous world
with flints of orison.