Some critical responses to 'The Elysium Testament - From The Irish Times - From the RTE Guide - From The Sunday Tribune - From The Sunday Independent - Irish Studies Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, WP Journal, Krino, Irish University Review, Cork Literary Review, The SHOp, TriQuarterly (Florida), The Seneca Review, The Literary Review (NJ), Solo (CA), Artlife (CA) Oxford Poetry (UK), Poetry Review (UK), Orbis (UK), The Whoseday Book, The Great Book of Ireland.

Some critical responses to 'September Elegies':

From The Irish Times (3rd October, 2003)

Kevin Myers, writing in The Irish Times (3 October) remarked that 'The death of her father last year informs and inspires many of the poems. Needless to say these are not maudlin affairs, but studied and gentle meditations upon life and love, upon the vital, unimportant details of daily existence, and upon the tiny quotidian duties of those who attend upon the last days of a loved one's life. ' Further on he remarks 'She is good on sex too: 'The Muse Demands My Tongue' should be read and remembered by every teenage girl as a lode-stone, a guide towards that strange place where heart and vulva meet. in other words, she does Eros very well indeed - sensuously, warmly, tenderly and always with humour.'

From poet Michael Coady comes the following commentary:
'This elegantly cadenced work shows Mary O'Donnell in mature possession of her distinctive voice and vision. In poems that seek 'to be true to the light and dark/ in each of us', the inner and outer search for meaning and fulfillment finds shapely utterance in the book's structured progression through the haunted towards the consolatory and on to the elegiac and tender. The transcendent is occasionally encountered ('the marvellous incarnate') and articulated in a register that is characteristically scrupulous, sensuous and subtle. Against the clear-eyed awareness that 'everything is borrowed' and that love 'rides on the brink of nothing', love remains the grounded act of faith that may exalt, transfigure and redeem the human experience and its mystery.'

Some critical responses to 'The Elysium Testament':

From The Evening Press (5th November, 1999)

David Robbins finds himself highly impressed by Mary O'Donnell's latest work, The Elysium Testament.

Mary O'Donnell's new book is hard to define. It is full of mystery, yet it is not a thriller; it is an elegiac testament to a relationship, yet it is not a romance; it deals with our fear of the supernatural, yet it is not a horror story. It is, however, a powerful and beautifully-written novel.
Mary O'Donnell's first novel The Light-Makers, was published to critical acclaim in 1992. She is also an accomplished poet and broadcaster on literature. Her poet's instinct comes through strongly in her writing of The Elysium Testament.
The story is told by Nina in what is surely the longest suicide note in literary history. Her child Roland has died and she is writing to her ex-husband Neil, explaining how it all went wrong.
Surprisingly, the device works well, as the layers of what happened to Roland are peeled back one by one. Along the way, the story of Nina and Neil's marriage is told touchingly.
Nina is a restorer of grottoes, again surely a first for the profession of a novel's main protagonist. Her work on the restoration of a Co. Kildare cave is a metaphor for her retreat from what was happening to her marriage - and to her son.
Roland is Neil and Nina's second child. He is a special child, and the descriptions of him reminded me of the psychic child in the movie Poltergeist. Just how special he is becomes apparent when Nina sees him levitate, firstly, and bizarrely, over a pool of spilled Worcester sauce.
O'Donnell creates the special atmosphere that surrounds Roland, and as her description of him gradually deepens, the reader is aware of the Christ parallel: here is a child with powers the world cannot understand and must, therefore, destroy.
There are two set-pieces: a party thrown by Neil and Nina in their home by the weir in Lucan, and the final climactic scene in the restored grotto. Both are beautifully handled.
As Nina writes her long letter of self-justification, she begins her journey to self-forgiveness, and the novel ends on a note of hope. The power of O'Donnell's writing makes the plot, which sounds almost laughable when blandly told, seem real. It is a fine achievement.

From The Irish Times, (4th December, 1999): The Parent trap

Review by Kathy Cremin
The Elysium Testament is a savage exploration of the primal forces of transgression, fear and death. The narrative takes the form of an extended letter written by Nina to her husband, who has left her following the death of their four-year old son, Roland. Nina's letter - confessional, diary, suicide note - begins on Hallowe'en and continues over six haunted weeks as she tries to make sense of her son's death.
Elysium is the name both of the house where Nina now lives alone and of the grotto she most recently worked on. As a highly-sought-after restorer, Nina's work takes her to once-decadent estates to re-create lush caverns dedicated to Greek and Roman gods, ornate monuments to the mysteries of nature, fertility and excess. Through the beauty of rocks, crystals and ancient architecture, Nina believed herself and her husband to be in touch with the suppressed and sensuous world evoked by the decadent Monoan groggos - far from the spiritless, messed-up anaemia that passes for normality.
The passion triggered by destruction and death has terrible consequences, which unravel as the Elysium grotto, Nina's masterpiece of illusion, reaches completion. In pursuit of its perfection, Nina had escaped Roland for long periods. Her recognition of the boy's mysterious condition filled her with unease, and though she attempted to repress her feelings, her relationship with Roland became increasingly fraught.
What emerges is a record of Nina's failure to understand and accept her son's uncanny ways and her subsequent murderous desires to hurt and destroy aspects of his personality. The Elysium Testament is a provocative novel that bravely explores unspeakable secrets and the denial and complicity that surround terror in families. O'Donnell's writing is stark, clear and grimly witty, recalling the dark fables of Helen Dunmore or Michele Roberts.
There is, too, a dark, gothic aspect to this tale. The antiquated, half-forgotten groggos, decorated with bizarre objects like things picked from the underside of the human imagination, relate to the suppressed emotions of guilt, sin and fear which endure long after the forms of religion have been dispensed with. At the heart of the book is revealed a moral question for our times: what happens when a parent fails to thrive?

Emer Martin (author of 'More Bread or I'll Appear' Houghton Mifflin 1999) writes as follows (on Amazon.com): 'One of the most extraordinary things about this book is its portrayal of the ordinary middle class Irish family, which has often been ignored in modern Irish fiction or dismissed entirely … The writing sparkles with intense wit and Nina is extremely funny in her observations … A startling story of modern day saints, psychiatrists, twins real and imagined, dealing with the split self, the damaged self and ultimately and triumphantly, the transcendent self. Highly recommended.'

From the RTE Guide, (4th November, 1999)
This is a thoughtful, cerebral tale of motherhood, or art, of fragility, of life, of life's denial. Mary O'Donnell has taken an image and run with it, built on it. It's a disturbing and daring exploration.

From The Sunday Tribune (24th October, 1999)
This is writing at its purest and most powerful. Bravely exploring grief and guilt O'Donnell encapsulates heartbreak in a novel which is alternately terse and lyrical. She slices open a middle-class Irish family to reveal the tragedy which has a mother contemplating suicide. A successful architect whose specialty is restoring follies and grottoes, she is wrapped up in her work and in her affair with a colleague. Slowly we learn that her four-year-old son is not only neglected but beaten by her. She fears his powers, supernatural powers she herself had as a child. Distraught by the death of the child she sometimes hated, her urge to suicide seems logical.
Far from being a flight of fancy, The Elysium Testament is grounded in harsh psychological truth and is both horrifying and spellbinding It shows throughout that the author is also a poet.

From The Sunday Independent (14th November, 1999)
Review by Emer O'Kelly

Mary O'Donnell writes exhilarating, almost enthralling prose. That's the first thing that emerges from her third novel, The Elysium Testament. Her style is pellucid, the light seeming to glow from deep within the thought processes; but in almost stark contrast, the colours are etched with a miniaturist's brush, finely detailed, and so accurately expressive of the writer's purpose that they seem almost insultingly simple.
But there's nothing either simple or insulting about this intensely felt, metaphysical novel. Ostensibly, it tells the story of the breakdown of a marriage, and or how the bewildering, destructive love/hate of a mother for a mysterious child can bring about that breakdown.
But the novel is much more: it explores obsession, and fear of the unknown recesses of the human mind. Above all, it describes in pitiless detail the way absorption with beautiful form (in this case the restoration of ancient grottoes) can freeze the human spirit when it's untempered by the turbulent practicalities of love's generosity.
Nina's terror of what increasingly appears to be evidence of the saintly paranormal is echoed from her own bullied childhood, when, driven to swim competitively by a domineering father, she had visions of her dead mother as she ploughed through the chlorinated pool water.
and if Roland is heautoscopic, as the psychologists say (that is, he sees a doppelganger), Nina too has a doppelganger in her twin Hugon, who also plays a part in the tragedy that is precipitated.
O'Donnell weaves the thread of her complex thesis into a magic carpet of crawling horror: that a mother can torture in the pursuit of perfection, that learning can destroy passion, that beauty can be fiercely ugly.
The story is told in retrospect as Nina, her life in ruins and close to total nervous collapse, writes a series of maddened self-justifying testaments to her estranged husband. There is ultimate redemption for her, but even that is bleak, a harsh re-entry into a world in which she has always been an outsider.
But the literary achievement lies in the language which manufactures this psychologically surreal world:
"I watched the shadowy impring of the sun through the flying fog. It hung like a leaden ball and I thought, this is it. This lamp, ball, light, coalescence, is all there is. When it dies, and when the solar flares stop flaring, so will the seasons. So will we …"
And even in Nina's redemption, we remember only her eerie foresight, in this novel of soaring, elegant perception.

From The Irish Times, (23rd October, 1993)
'Spiderwoman's Third Avenue Rhapsody'
Review by Sean Dunne

Mary O'Donnell's new collection confirms the power and value of a voice which had its first outing in Reading the Sunflowers in September (1990). Quite simply, she is shaping up as one of the best poets in the place. The energetic title poem, with its shadow of Ginsberg, is not, as the blurb claims, ''tunning'' rather, her gift, which is distinguished by a strong and subtle awareness of language, is shown at its most assured in shorter poems.
There lies history an dartefact,
small arrows, darts,
a favourite tomahawk
dropped by a fleeing Indian,
splinters from a canoe
that shot the Hudson cataracts,
glistening with fish
while the future slept.
Encompassing America and Maynooth, and with themes that include a famine field, childbirth and Eve, Spiderwoman's Third Avenue Rhapsody offers a portrait of 'an original pilgrim/ who has seen/ something/ in cloud-ships/ ripe leaves/ the dripping wind'