Jennifer Cornell, Author Jennifer Cornell, Author University of
Pittsburgh Press $22.5 (174p) ISBN 978-0-8229-3855-2 Reviewed
on: 05/29/1995 Release date: 06/01/1995 Cornell's succinct
stories take us into the heart of tormented and conflicting
communities in contemporary Northern Ireland. However, rather
than reproduce in all their helter-skelter brutality the details
of sectarian hatred, she refracts it through vignettes of
ordinary life alleviated, and sometimes transformed, by lyrical
and compassionate revelations. At its best, this tack works
well. The narrator of ``Heat'' recalls how she and her father
used to trap and nurture animals taken from a wood. One day,
while they are away from home, they see a terrorist explosion.
When they return, their fledglings are dead, killed not by
terrorism but by rabbits deprived of the vegetation they would
normally feed on, driven to what is, for them, an unnatural
level of violence. With everything pointing symbolically to the
bombing, the story's feeling of eerie