Don Hynes’ The Irish Girl, is a book of poems that reimagines a world gone by when his Irish ancestors were on either side of the Atlantic. You will find here poems that tell a story, poems that probe family mysteries, poems of love and death, poems of the land and people of Ireland as they struggled for their footing in America. These are good, true poems that you should read. - Sandy Brown Jensen
author, poet, video storyteller

These are poems to savor and ponder - a cycle of poems, not just a collection, Like photographs found in an attic trunk, each of these poems is part story and part mystery. By the poet’s own admission, some of the poems tell of events that are not historical fact. Nevertheless each of these stories is unflinchingly true, and when strung together they create a deep and compelling family lineage. Hynes pulls the reader through moments of courage, pain, failure and love into a profound and immensely satisfying inheritance. - Lloyd Meeker
author, poet

The Irish Girl pulls us through time from an ancient island to a beckoning new continent and back. He invites the reader to examine the required stamina of living in tumultuous and changing times - entwining historic events and family trauma to allow a depth of meaning to the lives of those who went before and poignancy to the passage of time. With the omniscient sensibility of an observer, he explores the dance between birth and death; the building, evolution and dissolution of “family;” the heartbreak of leaving and loss; the tying together of fates and unfulfilled promises through generations, and the unexplainable connectedness of it all. - Bev Petow
artist, book designer