Mute/Unmute, (Arlen House, 2020)
Mute/Unmute, like each of Mitchell’s collections, is a carefully produced aesthetic object featuring artwork that reflects her keen interest in the visual arts, along with cover text and end matter chosen with equal care. Mute/Unmute is the work of a poet in a state of grace at the height of her powers.
- Dick Edelstein, Dublin Review of Books, April 2021
Cover Image by Lisa MolinaMountains for Breakfast, (Arlen House, 2017)
Geraldine Mitchell’s work is characterised by a rare quality of attention and subtlety. Her images are deft and precise — ‘the road runs with braided water’. In many of her poems she successfully evokes the contradictions which we experience every day of our human lives. Understatement is one of her most powerful tools. In her latest collection she brings us down the long corridor of loss and she heralds the return of light, often the western light of Mayo and Clare Island. This is work as fine as it is strong.
-Moya Cannon
Geraldine Mitchell's Mountains for Breakfast is a complex, honest shipping forecast of a book. Heavy grief-weather and a relentless joy wave-wash these poems in crystalline language.
-Alice Lyons
Of Birds and Bones, (Arlen House, 2014)
Cover image by Lisa Molina
About Of Birds and Bones, Nessa O’Mahony wrote: “Mitchell’s vision doesn’t spare us the harsh realities of a world where people doss in phone boxes or refugees suffer from somebody else’s war; the anger is restrained, and is all the more powerful for it.” [Trumpet, Poetry Ireland, April 2014]
Cover image by Karen Papacek
World Without Maps, (Arlen House, 2011)
"World Without Maps is a cartography of psychological landscapes that makes her readers look deep within themselves. Mitchell is interested in the frozen and lost moments of time. She creates a poetic universe that is teeming with imaginary possibilities but also human tragedies. Mitchell is an expert at capturing moments that others sidestep: whether it is an unborn child’s first unnoticed kicks or a mentally ill person’s moment of internal quiet, she seems to inhabit these spaces with empathy and a powerful poetic awareness. Death is a central axis around which the volume moves. Lull describes what it would be like to step outside of time’s relentless devouring of life and become a painting, “no breath . . . no movement . . . no sound but the soft hiss of sand”, and concludes with the powerful image of Earth turning, where “cell by cell, / gravity bent, blades are sucked / into movement”. Mitchell’s poetry is perceptive, astute and technically sophisticated: World Without Maps is an exceptional debut collection that deserves critical attention and acclaim." [Borbála Faragó, The Irish Times, 27 August 2011]
Deeds Not Words: the life and work of Muriel Gahan (Town House, 1997)
“In 1930 Muriel Gahan set up that unique Dublin institution, The Country Shop, in Sty Stephen’s Green and steered its course for close on fifty years. She was deeply involved in the Royal Dublin Society and the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and was directly responsible for setting up Country Markets Ltd., the Irish Homespun Society and the Crafts Council of Ireland. Muriel’s motto was that of the Society of United Irishwomen, Deeds not Words. This is the story behind those deeds, disentangled strand by strand from the cat’s cradle of interconnecting organisations she became involved with and through which she worked. It is also a tribute to the countless women and men who worked with and around her.
In this illuminating and tender biography, Geraldine Mitchell traces the life of Muriel Gahan, a unique woman who nurtured the creative and social life of rural women and craftworkers and made them matter to an ordinarily uncaring society.”
Escape to the West (Attic Press, 1994)
“Aoife takes a summer job at Innisfree House, a home for elderly women. She meets one of the women, Mrs Imogen O’Toole, who is proud, fiercely independent and determined to unmask the shady practices of the bad-tempered matron.
Teenage girl and elderly woman become partners in adventure as they escape to the west.”
Welcoming the French (Attic Press, 1992)
“When 13-year-old Gemma decides to help a group of young French refugees enjoy a holiday in Connemara in the West of Ireland, she never imagines that her life could become so complicated or that things cold go so wrong.
As busloads of French teenagers arrive in Gemma’s town she thinks that all eventualities have been catered for. Everything goes well until two of them go missing…!”