Time Being

"In these poems, many addressing the 'long Sunday' of the pandemic years, Carmen Bugan reflects on the impact of the virus through the prism of personal family moments and local experience. She writes with disciplined precision, always attendant to the necessary nuance poetry demands. Her lyric voice and moral imagination in these poems gathers its energy from the urgency of daily concerns and anxieties, as well as the need to witness. Set against a time of crisis, she maintains a sense of wonder at the resilience of nature, her children, her own spirit. At the heart of this compelling collection is assurance and the poet's good instruction to herself 'to feel the real, to protect myself against the imagined': advice each of us should heed." -Gerard Smyth, Poetry Editor, The Irish Times