Mary O'Connell

A  luminous novel on the medieval Benedictine nun, healer, musician, teacher and visionary, Hildegard of Bingen.(1098-1179)

Set in the Rhineland of 1148-1153, 'The King's Daughter' is a beautifully written work, shining its light on a creative and complex age. Filled with memorable characters and insights, warm passion and dry humour, it is radiant above all, with the longings and sufferings of love.

Mary O'Connell and
Roshanak Vahdani

'Wish that I could find my rest in you
cease this endless wandering, arrive at home in you.
Wish that I could find at last the sacred garden of
the Earth. Its richest fruit, its deepest gift of You.

ISBN 0-9751468-0- 7. RRP $29.95

ISBN 0-9751468-1-5  RRP $17.95

In a damp, obscure monastery in the Rhineland, a frail woman lies silent and utterly still upon her sickbed. She has been refused permission by her Abbot to leave the monastery and establish her own community. But Hildegard's book of divine visions also lies silent, and incomplete.

Travelling reluctantly towards the Abbey is Henry, the worldly and charismatic Archbishop of Mainz, charged with the mission of saving the much desired work of revelations. His is a journey spiralling inwards to the place where the prophet lies, apparently silenced and crushed, but spiritually powerful still…

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Sample of the text

Author: Mary O'Connell. 
Speaks to Rachael Kohn on Radio National  Wednesday 3 March 2004 at 2.15pm here

Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was born in Nishapur, Persia and gained fame in his own lifetime as astronomer, mathematician and philosopher. His quatrains (rubaiyat) appear to have been written for a much smaller audience; that of his Sufi teacher and community.

Over the centuries following his death, the poems gained widespread currency and respect in the Persian speaking world, and were introduced to the West in the 19th century through the translations of Edward Fitzgerald. His 'The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam' is now a work of English literature.

Ignoring, however, European scholarship of his own time and centuries of Eastern understanding of Khayyam as a spiritual poet, Fitzgerald chose to read Omar Khayyam as a secular poet of resistance, a drunken hedonist. Yet in Sufi terminology, wine is a symbol of Divine love, and intoxication is the state of ecstatic union with the Divine.

Working with the Persian originals, and decorated with beautiful calligraphy, these fifty new poems keep faith with the imagery and meanings of Khayyam and offer contemporary readers a fresh chance to engage with Khayyam outside of Edwardian imagery and fantasies.

Far from being a poet of dissolution and forgetfulness, Khayyam calls us to awaken, to live in the present, appreciating both the beauty and the transitory nature of our world. These are spiritual poems, relating to, yearning for, and arguing with a very real Divine Power.

Sample of the text