Atlas and Map

"Joan McBreen’s Map and Atlas comes to us from a confluence of two great rivers; two streams of thought, the one private, the other public. Her map-work has been achieved through observation and memory, through a restlessness in nature and clear-headed observations made through windows flung open.

Here is a poet widely travelled, from Omey to Wellington, but with the lens constantly looking inward: ‘The senses are not visionary/ and we ask neither more nor less/ of this earth in whose measure/ we are fixed.’ Map and Atlas is a work of great emotional clarity and honesty, a poetry at once intimate and universal, from a poet who goes from strength to strength with every year that passes." Thomas McCarthy