This is a superbly moving book by a poet writing at the top of her form
Michael Sharkey
In Blood Plums Lorraine McGuigan offers us something rich and deeply nourishing; the fruit of many years of careful labour. These poems — by turns elegiac, ironic, passionate — are rendered in a clear and chaste style, as if chastened themselves by exprience and the harrowing of memory. And yet these poems, in fact, in truth, are a celebration of what it has meant to be alive, and alive especially to a life of poetry.
Paul Kane
Blood Plums
Returning after the treatment
They talk of making jam, wonder
If they still have time
The ancient tree is shedding
Its burden; on the ground plums
Shrinking, turning deeply into
Themselves. Stepping over
the fallen they tug at limbs
discover fruit spared by birds.
He looks tired. Lips bleeding
juice she presses her mouth to his
stamps him with the indelible
taste of her. He offers a magenta smile.
Slow dissolve of light this humid
afternoon but all too soon
winter dark, nights touching zero,
And in their bed the giving
the receiving of warmth
old flesh picking up a memory,
scent of desire. While outside
stripped bare, the tree hangs on
Lorraine McGuigan 