Description
à la belle étoile is a blazing narrative of female self-empowerment and survival in late 1700s France – the Age of Exploration. This book-length poem sequence gives voice to a woman almost lost to history, who, through a chance encounter with a botanist, dared to carve her own space in a man’s world. Through a non-linear collage of water and land narratives, we hear the voice of Jeanne Baré as she undergoes the destabilising experience of hiding her sex, taking on tasks that require physical stamina, strength and courage, enduring exposure and assault, and collecting plants never before seen in Europe. Slipping the limited moorings of her native field and village, she voyages to exotic lands, until finally, after seven years, she returns home, becoming the first woman to have circumnavigated the world.
Praise for Afric’s earlier work
These poems are shot through with light and energy. Remarkable for the clarity of their focus, their colour and inventive language, they speak about loss and love and human predicaments with open and hopeful insight; they swoop to conclusions that surprise and satisfy.
– Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Afric McGlinchey is an exciting and innovative poet. Her often exotic narratives and structures are distinctive in their imagery and symbol, with a deeply evocative sensitivity to landscape.
– Leanne O’Sullivan
This is McGlinchey’s most refined gift: meticulously applying herself to the chemistry of life, and making it evident in its minimal constituents.
– Dr. Maria Luisa Vezzali, Introduction to Italian translation of Ghost of the Fisher Cat
These are charged poems…Afric McGlinchey’s words mine the pain of grief and love with an acute and affecting music.
– Paul Perry
Intimate, embodied, propulsive poetry with a crisp and quick nature. I connected with it immediately. Brilliant.
– Sarah Byrne, Editor, The Well Review