Elisabeth Sheffield’s Ire Land is an exquisite construction––as sly as Nabokov, as tender as Beckett, deeply intelligent and run through with heart and dark hilarity and great waves of rage and beauty. It possesses an undeniable cumulative power and a level of invention that is both thrilling and poignant.
Carole Maso, The Art Lover and Mother & Child
Elisabeth Sheffield translates the merely geographical into the intensely psychological here, transforming Ireland into Ire Land, which is to say the land of wrath, in which the parenthetical faery tale of the title in part points to the theoretical shenanigans of a certain sort of easy, essentialist, ageist feminism we found in the sixties, seventies, and eighties particularly, and post-structuralism generally. Both prose and thought throughout are ever sparky and surprising, even as they are shot through with a piercing recognition of and negotiation with growing older as a woman in ways that complicate the youthful utopian riot-grrrl clichés — the distance between, say, granny hair worn as a fashion statement by twenty somethings and the bewildering real deal of continuous cellular undoing. The result is ever smart, crisp, astute, revealing, ironic, and richly (sometimes downright brutally) honest, mischievous in form, heart-hammering in its Beckettian comic vision, and impressive in its Nabokovian command over textual and paratextual material shot through with a meticulous knowledge, understanding, and intellectual bite.
Lance Olsen, My Red Heaven and Theories of Forgetting
Ire Land confronts the unholy trinity of gender, violence, and literary representation as Elisabeth Sheffield dares to reveal an ageing female with a deliciously disastrous life in protagonist Sandra Dorn. An unorthodox homage to Samuel Beckett’s Molloy reborn as woman, Sandra is a conundrum, unapologetically human, outrageous, and absurd. At a time when society expects her to fall into the cliché of a harmless older woman, Sandra is wonderfully complex, ingeniously flawed, yet so difficult that society doesn’t know what to do with her. For these very reasons, she is all the more present for having disappeared. The reader searches for Sandra in emails, in the marginalia of her mysterious editor, in her abandoned children and estranged siblings, and in her cagey colleagues to find a fully complex woman both known and unknowable. Refusing to fall into neatly gendered traps of narrative and linguistic cliché, Ire Land frees the reader from the cultural violence of language with dazzling insight and dark humor.
Aimee Parkison, Girl Zoo and Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman
