Marie Cadden’s debut collection, Gynaecologist in the Jacuzzi, is sassy and sensuous – at times wickedly dark, often rueful and nostalgic, always lyrically female – curving on the ear, easy on the eye, ‘juicing on the tongue’. Her work – as a teacher of children with autism, teacher of the deaf, play therapist – has fine-tuned Marie’s succinct poetry and she delivers it with style, humour, bite.
From hammocks and shooting stars to mammograms and the adventures of ageing, the poems move onward, ‘possibilities trembling’ towards ‘the relentless wobble’ of ‘one last sashay’. These are poems of hope, enchantment, disenchantment and acceptance.
