Description

Which could also be the same as saying everything's impossible in this family. It's the tightrope I walk between the Irish knowledge that cookies always crumble, and the Midwestern fact that a sunny disposition can get you anywhere...

Bridget Fox's life is full of blessings, including her husband Pierce, a talented sculptor, and her two delightful daughters. But her elder daughter, Maeve, doesn't seem to be developing the way she's supposed to. She doesn't respond when she's called. She doesn't like to be touched, and the slightest disturbance sends her into a frenzy. Suddenly Bridget, who has plenty of experience with travel and art and sophisticated pleasures, is facing challenges she's never imagined. And as she copes with loss, change, and uncertainty-sometimes with nothing to hold on to but Maeve, and her sense of humor- she begins to find a strength she's never imagined...

About the Author

Elizabeth Burns (b. 1957) is a Scottish poet. Having spent much of her life in Scotland, where she worked in bookselling and publishing, she moved to Lancaster where she taught creative writing.Her first full length collection,Ophelia and other poems, was published in 1991, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award for First Book of the Year. Her second collection,The Gift of Light, was published in 1999, followed byThe Lantern Bearersin 2007.Held, her fourth full length collection was published in 2010.In addition to full-length collections, Elizabeth produced a number of pamphlets includingThe Shortest Days, which won the 2009 Michael Marks Award.The Alterationwas shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Poetry Pamphlet Award.Her work has appeared in many anthologies of Scottish poetry, including Dreamstate: the new Scottish poets (Polygon, 1994; 2002), The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poems (Faber, 2000), Modern Scottish Women Poets (Canongate, 2003), Scotlands: poet and nations (Carcanet, 2004), The Edinburgh Anthology of Twentieth-century Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (Luath, 2006).She was an early member of Pomegranate Women Writers in Edinburgh and continued to be closely involved in a writing group in Lancaster.Her love of pottery and identification with the craft led her to a number of collaborations with ceramicists and other makers. She also wrote about painters, including Gwen John, Winifred Nicholson, andAnne Redpath.From her first book, Ophelia and other Poems, Elizabeth was a poet whose work was suffused with the colour and scent of ordinary lives. She was also a quietly fearless writer, never shying from the hurt done by one human to another. Her delicate and graceful poems have space in them for what has been lost or broken, for the flawed and crooked, as well as the sensuousness of the everyday, particularly in the lives of women which she celebrated in poem after poem.