Afric McGlinchey: À la Belle Étoile. The Odyssey of Jeanne Baré

West Cork poet Afric McGlinchey’s latest book À la Belle Étoile. The Odyssey of Jeanne Baré is a blazing narrative of female self-empowerment and survival in late 1700s France – the Age of Exploration. This book-length poem sequence gives voice to a woman almost lost to history, who, through a chance encounter with a botanist, dared to carve her own space in a man’s world. Through a non-linear collage of water and land narratives, we hear the voice of Jeanne Baré as she undergoes the destabilising experience of hiding her sex, taking on tasks that require physical stamina, strength and courage, enduring exposure and assault, and collecting plants never before seen in Europe. Slipping the limited moorings of her native field and village, she voyages to exotic lands, until finally, after seven years, she returns home, becoming the first woman to have circumnavigated the world.