“Once in a blue moon, a new collection of poems comes into my life and stops me dead in my tracks with the power of its originality. I journey wide-eyed from poem to poem and am mesmerized by the poet’s utterly unexpected choice of words, quite unlike anything I have ever witnessed before. I cannot recommend Denise Ryan’s collection, Of Silken Waters, highly enough, and it’s the best thing that has heppened to me for a very long time.”

Pat Ingoldsby, poet, playwright, writer and performer

The distinctive voice of Irish-born Denise Ryan is strikingly captured in the debut collection of selected poems ‘Of Silken Waters’ that offers an immediate entry into her world, but also expresses an implicit realism that consistently sustains their compelling thematic substance. Intuitively savvy to the nuances of words, Ryan’s poetry is a skillful modulation of her own symbolic iconography that effortlessly draws the reader into her world. Her purity of heart and courage to rise above all tragedy always finds poetic redemption bravely measured against her authenticity as a woman. As such, her poetry continually affirms the very purest of poetic expression without pretension or self-consciousness. Denise Ryan’s Of Silken Waters is a work of enduring quality and courage that maintains its light in spite of the mercurial face of darkness that surrounds us, bringing the reader to a loftier realm of spirit, to a deeper meditation on beauty, darkness, light, joy and the struggle to maintain the heart in the shadow of all adversity.

The Literary Yard