High Tea at a Low Table

Irish born and Vermont settled poet Angela Patten turns her lyrical skills to this story-telling memoir of growing up in horse-and-cart Dublin, striving to find her own voice amid the insistent clamor of family and clergy. She was a child in the 50s when Irish milmen still rode bicycles, ladled loose mil from a tilley-can, and telling stories was both entertainment and sustenance. She broke away from home and the authoritarian rule of the Catholic Church as she came of age in the 60s and an unruly future on American soil beckoned.