Moira Bailis

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF MOIRA BAILIS

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF MOIRA BAILIS. David Messineo, editor.

Bailis portrait A TRANSCONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVE ... Poet Moira Bailis (1921-2013) began writing poetry before the age of twenty in her native Ireland. Like many poets who write for the love of the art, she did not begin publishing her work extensively until later in life. Since the 1980s, she has had over 200 poetry publication credits, both in the United States and Ireland, and has authored one poetry chapbook, poems (2003). The brink of her tenth decade of life saw her still engaged in her art.
Bailis lived in Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, New York City, and finally, in Fort Lee, New Jersey (her home since 1966). Her poems encompass her life’s journey as well as her broad literary interests, social awareness, and activism. A lover and advocate of poetry, she taught workshops, and lectured live and on radio about poetry, poets, and writers.
David Messineo, Bailis’s friend and long-time publisher, in cooperation with the poet and her family, has assembled 450 of her collected poems into two volumes. Ireland figures large in both — a home place many times revisited over a long life, its landmarks, Celtic history, and political troubles recalled.
This first volume, The Antidote to Prejudice, is arranged geographically, reflecting the places Bailis lived in or visited (or imagined, in the case of South America, Africa and Antarctica). Ireland and New Jersey bookend this varied collection of 190 poems. The section, “To Ireland in the Fading Times,” could stand as the poet’s missive to the land of her birth. In the editor’s words, these poems “are dually interesting from the standpoints of poetic craft and the capturing of history.”
Many other poems in Volume I center on nature and landscape — those especially gleaned from her long walks and hikes exploring Northern New Jersey — and they mark her as a keen word-water-colorist of bird, tree and season.
The second volume, It Has To Do With Seeing, has 260 poems, including some variant texts (edited by Melanie A. Pimont), and more than 80 poems concerning the poet's Irish childhood, family and friends. Poems touching on the literary life, and on writers such as Austen, Emily Brontë, Sandburg, Thoreau, Brodsky, Merrill, Williams, Frost and Dickinson are all here. Poems of nature, season, and landscape abound as well. “Closing Remarks,” a fine cluster of reflective pieces, is in the tradition of Whitman's ever-extended “Next-to-Last Thoughts.”
This intriguing poet, with a transcontinental perspective on the tumults of modern life and the consolations of the solitary commune with nature, bequeaths us more than eight decades of her life and thought in this two-volume set. Her many poetic friends, and readers on both sides of the Atlantic pond, can delight in this restrained and thoughtful production.

Moira Bailis. The Antidote to Prejudice: The Collected Poems of Moira Bailis, Volume 1. 6 x 9 inches, 272 pages. Paperback ISBN 0922558523, $17.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon. Or, CLICK HERE to purchase the PDF ebook for $3.00.

Moira Bailis. It Has To Do With Seeing: The Collected Poems of Moira Bailis, Volume 2. 6 x 9 inches, 328 pages. Paperback ISBN 092255854X, $18.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon. Or, CLICK HERE to purchase the PDF ebook for $3.00.

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Version 24 Updated February 20, 2024