Geraldine Mitchell is an Irish writer and poet who was born in Dublin and who, since 2000, has been living on the Co. Mayo coast, close to the town of Louisburgh. She has a degree in English and French from Trinity College Dublin and a Masters in English Literature from the University of Aix-en-Provence. She has published four collections of poetry with Arlen House, World Without Maps (2011), Of Birds and Bones (2014), Mountains for Breakfast (2017) and most recently Mute/Unmte (2020).

She is also the author of two novels for young people: Welcoming the French (Attic Press, 1992) and Escape to the West (Attic Press, 1994). In 1997 her biography of Muriel Gahan, Deeds Not Words, was published by Town House and launched by the late Margaret MacCurtain.

In 2008, she won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award.

 [cover 'Gethsemane Garden' by Mags Duffy]

A deeply perceptive poet with a keen sense of the natural world, Mitchell’s poems both offer a timely warning that the planet is mortal, and offer a reassuring reminder of life’s cyclical nature. These poems are a stunning sketch of a world that is a place of great beauty and great challenge. Mitchell reflects on a life marked out in distances - between cities; the sky to the sea; the spaces between the paw prints of a wolf; masterfully excavating extraordinary glimpses of the ordinary. These poems listen, watch, and unearth a voice for the voiceless - from Mayo and far beyond - Mitchell explores humans at their most vulnerable. And when our systems fail, the counter pressures of love and humanity are all we have. An assured and powerful collection, Mute/Unmute is contemporary poetry in its finest.

Elaine Feeney, poet & novelist

There’s a lot of darkness here, but that darkness never feels depressing. There’s too much light in the language, too much craft and passion in the making. Mitchell has dreamed up a black tulip of a book that can surprise us with brightness as it pours out the dark.

Theodore Deppe, poet 

As political as it is personal and as global as it is local, this intensely moving collection pays homage to people and place with sensuous detail and profound empathy.

Jane Clarke, poet