Dodder Daughter

*They say when you turn sixty

you become invisible.

Try sixty millennia

of rising, trickling,

flowing, spurting,

curving bank sides*

Turning sixty and recovering from major surgery in the spring of 2024, Nessa O’Mahony returned to her beloved local river, the Dodder. As healing progressed, O’Mahony’s fascination for the river grew and she conceived of a plan, not only to map out its trajectory from source to sea, but to imagine a voice and personality for the river that has curved through south Dublin for millennia. That ambition grew into a wider exploration of the feminine in all its cycles, seen through the shifting dynamics of mother-daughter relationships and the wider landscape, and a growing sense of what is encroaching, what is at stake and what may be lost. The resulting poems brim with humane feeling, but also with a sardonic quiet wit that makes such moments clearly hard won.