If No Moon

If No Moon by award-winning author Moira Linehan documents the effects of profound loss and the dark withdrawal into grief. Wherever the author turns—the landscape of her backyard in Massachusetts, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, the museums of Florence, or the cliffs of Inishmor in Ireland—she sees only the geography of emptiness. Crossovers between craft and art, form and voice, knitting and memory, recur throughout the poems. Lying within the tradition of narrative poetry, elegy, and the lyric, the collection reveals the mysterious journey of return. Coming full circle to find again the lyrical and the transcendent within the everyday, beauty eventually wins out. If No Moon, accessible to all who have or will experience loss, is the voice of one who has come to understand that there is no other work but starting over. 

If No Moon by award-winning author Moira Linehan documents the effects of profound loss and the dark withdrawal into grief.

Moira Linehan, award-winning poet, poetry teacher, and prolific author, has published numerous poems. She holds both a master of fine arts in writing and a master of arts in teaching English.

“What a welcome and brilliant debut is Moira Linehan’s superb If No Moon. This moving and luminous volume contains profound meditations on loss, on the rituals of mourning the beloved, and on the poet’s difficult pilgrimage from ‘grief’s labyrinth’ to an eventual willingness to embrace life again. Linehan’s lyrical and precise poems honestly enact and reveal our paradoxical natures, our mystery enshrouded lives­—our human frailty, and our surprising strengths and resilience.”—Maurya Simon, author of Ghost Orchid “Linehan’s If No Moon is razor sharp and affecting. More than just a cancer journal, she’s crafted a skein of life that connects us all.”—Library Journal  

“There is a calm insistence—a fearlessness, really—in Moira Linehan’s willingness to ask the large and abiding questions: What constitutes faith? How do we live with the past? And, above all, when will grieving end? She asks such questions, as Milosz once put it, ‘not out of sorrow, but in wonder.’ These are quiet and impeccably crafted poems. But, more importantly, they possess courage.”
—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004