Lovely Legs
Series: Poetry
Publisher: Salmon Poetry, Ireland; Salmon Publishing
Published: March 2009
Place of publication: Ireland
Language: eng
Format: Softback
Number of pages: 77
Subjects: Poetry
First sentence: SKYLIGHT.     ...It is like the Brugal painting/The Fall of Icarus/where wings and all he splashes/into the water at the edge./What happens beyond, out of sight/is anyone's guess.

BORN YESTERDAY.     Earlier in the year this lane was littered/with double decker frogs, mating as if their lives/depended on it. They marked out a fat green line/as they expanded to catch warmth from the spring sun./We sidestepped this highway of life/as if on stepping stones, everywhere we looked/were bloated bodies, webbed feet/and not a croak out of anyone.
Description: A lively, readable collection concerned with the intricacies of relationships and the many moral contradictions of society,..they are all very clearly in O'Brien's voice, a seemingly carefree lilt which nonetheless exudes complexity and depth....Similarly, the many poems here addressed to or about O'Brien's 'younger self' attempt to civilise the unruliness of childhood, and, in a self-mythologising turn, lessons are always learnt. Often they are comically disproportionate to the experience, such as when O'Brien recalls how, as children travelling along redbrick lanes, she and her friends were approached by a pervert, a Joycean encounter which'made us remeber/to hurry home for 'tea.     Val Nolan Poetry Ireland Review 98, 2009.
In a book with such a breezy title, bright cover and light tone throughout there’s a much more serious and complex undercurrent at work. Paul Perry Irish Times, May '09