I’ve spent this month reading Heather Nolan’s Land of the Rock: Talamh an Carraig, which was given to me for free by Digitally Lit. Nolan's collection of poetry is an inquiry of land and belonging, digging and pulling up the Irish roots of the place that we know as Newfoundland. Her poetry is grounded in Newfoundland tradition and the history of Ireland. Her poems about Newfoundland were especially touching. I loved being able to picture the places that she mentions and being able to recognize pieces of my family in her words. I feel like through reading this book I have gained insight into the lives of my parents who grew up in Newfoundland and also my grandparents and aunt and uncles who never left.

The writing is filled with beautiful imagery as she mixes elemental details and realism, and through it you can both picture and learn more about the places she writes about. I found that at times her lines felt choppy, breaking up her flow that made some of the poems hard to read. Some poems had lots of full stop punctuations that I found jarring, while her best poetry is more melodic and has some space to breathe.
The book is also filled with snippets of Irish Gaelic and Nolan is insistent that it is not a dead language. In a footnote in one of her poems, when her sister says the same thing Nolan states: “Irish Gaelic is not a dead language. My sister is dumb.”

In one of her poems she recounts a memory when her mother asked her and her sister if they felt “connected to this land our ancestors worked.” Nolan’s answer is: “it’s more complicated than that,” and it is, and this collection is her exploring and learning from that complicated history. This book has really inspired me to want to read more work by Newfoundland authors and I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to do the same!