Noël Hanlon began writing seriously in 1994 when she attended the Flight of the Mind workshop on the McKenzie River in Oregon. Her poems have been published in the US and Ireland. She is a member of a small poetry group which includes several inspirational writers, including Ursula Le Guin and Molly Gloss. She has served on the board of Soapstone, an Oregon residency that provides women writers with a stretch of uninterrupted time for their creative work, and the opportunity to live in semi-solitude in the natural world. Noël herself lives this dream; her own poetry is born out of her relationships with the people, landscapes and animals, tame and wild, of her native Oregon.

Books by Noël Hanlon:

Other poems on the web by Noël Hanlon:
"Each May in Co. Clare"
"My Daughter's Window"

Noël Hanlon's Home Page.

About Blue Abundance:

"These poems are astonishing in their strength - the vigour of unjaded senses, the generosity of a mature heart. Without condescension and without glib reassurance, they offer that strength in the forms of an achieved, at times transcendent art."
—Ursula K. Le Guin

"Noël Hanlon's voice embodies luminous presence. Whether speaking so keenly and clearly of land she loves in Oregon and Ireland, conversations with neighbours and family, the raising of lambs, planting, nurturing, and harvesting, all the layers of a precious life and world - these are marvellous poems we could live in. They are that deep and that wide."
—Naomi Shihab Nye

"This is powerful love poetry; the painful and sometimes durable love achieved between humans - saucy, erotic, candid and funny... and it also has grand, ironic compassion for the earth and the living things that inhabit it in their fleeting way: hens milling about, sheep nurtured to be readied for slaughter, spiders weaving apparitions among the plants, the darkness thundering beneath. They tell one woman's life stories from the broad fields of Oregon to the landscapes of Clare and Conamara. A would-be recluse within the warm family, a traveller poised for flight but with her arms in the clay and her poet's passionate eye burrowing into what's beyond...these are rich and disciplined weavings: tart in places, crisp and surprising, calm, questioning, sorrowing, truthful and sensual. The work of a proper legislator."
—Lelia Doolan