The Inness of With - Eamon Kiernan 2002

The cold city. Looking at old pictures. Wandering the dark streets. Illuminations. Learning silence. The repentant sea. Learning to speak.

Seven themes, each a new spiritual world to the poet as he comes to terms with the loss of love. In this cycle of seven times seven poems, Eamon Kiernan has created a work of austere beauty, which persuades as much by its subdued musicality as by its spare, almost primitive symbolism.

From the author's introduction:
"When I first read that the number forty-nine might be special, I was living in what I believed was love. When it passed from my life, each new day came to seem a punishment duty, as if I was scratching out a meagre future from a rock face in a mine shaft, with nothing but torn hands and broken fingernails as implements. There must be something more, I felt, and if the number forty-nine was, as I had read, the number that stood opposite men and women as the potential to the actual, I could address it by addressing that number. This I tried, in poems composed of seven times seven syllables as I speak them, and found that I was looking for God."