Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2025
The Miracle Of Poems Getting Written, guest editorial by Thomas McCarthy.
The miracle is that new poems get written. It is something for each of us to consider carefully, especially those of us who are aging and subject to moments of depression and dejection about the whole poetry ‘business.’ Yesterday in Dublin we said farewell to the poet Paul Durcan who had just died in a nursing-home. In Ireland Durcan was as famous as our Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. Possibly more famous, or at least more familial, more familiar. His poems ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy,’ The Drimoleague Blues,’ ‘Making Love outside Aras an Uachtaráin,’ The Berlin Wall Café’ and ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meet Jesus on the Road to Moone’ were universally loved and quoted constantly by fashionable commentators as well as devoted followers of the poet. His funeral Mass in Ringsend was a real Dublin farewell, with the President of Ireland and his aide-de-camp in attendance, and Durcan is to be buried with his own people in faraway County Mayo on the West coast of Ireland. His greatest claim to fame may be his nearly four-minute contribution to the superb Van Morrison track ‘In the Days Before Rock ‘N’ Roll,’ Durcan’s voice intoning a litany of old European music stations, Luxembourg, Hilversum, Armed Forces Network, and his urgent crying of “Justin! Justin!” It is an extraordinary piece of music, more than that, a cultural performance, a cry from the wilderness of youth trapped in old Ireland. It is more Durcan than Van Morrison, and yet the Morrison music envelops the poet’s pleading voice with an uncanny, ghostly power. Listen to this track today, if you can, to remember a great lost poet.
On the day of his funeral Mass in Dublin I was reminded that the world of poetry goes on inside its own world when I attended an exquisite reading to launch three new Gallery Press collections in the Notre Dame University Centre in Dublin’s Merrion Square. A fine, prosperous, enthusiastic crowd, a number whom I’d seen at the Durcan funeral Mass, assembled round the three poets as Peter Fallon introduced them with immense pride: Frank McGuinness, Vona Groarke and Ciaran Berry. Vona Groarke read quietly from what is truly a jewel of a book, Infinity Pool, the title poem itself a gem:
‘And I am folding it now, this pool,
corner to corner, line to line,
so as to carry about with me
its deep blue scrap of lie.
But carrying folded water
isn’t feasible. You know that.’
Her writing is precise, chiselled and instructive for anyone learning how to write well. She is a poet of clouds, sea, light, summers and mothers. Her lovely poem ‘Setting My Mother’s Hair as an Ars Poetica’ has the force and delicacy of the best Sharon Olds’ poetry: ‘She’ll sit under hair that’s like corn on the cob…’ And the prose poem ‘Tipping Point’ is a real beauty, exemplary, worth buying her book for this alone, to see how successful a successful prose poem can be. Ciaran Berry’s States is a more widely conflicted and dramatic creature, all the poems stitched tightly into a large Amish quilt of American anxieties – though Dublin-born with Galway and Donegal connections, Berry has made an American life of his adulthood, teaching at the exclusive Trinity College in Connecticut. He tries to make sense of being an ‘Alien’ in a land that always seemed like family territory to Irish people (after all, quarter of the officers in Washington’s Continental Army were born in Ireland, his officer list reads like the Army List of King James at the Battle of the Boyne). In complex, meditative narratives and odysseys Berry outlines how he ended up in Queens, how he cinematically gets ‘lost in the spectacle and miss the allegory.’ He is where Marilyn Monroe’s white dress rises in a rush of air, where he’s watching French films in ‘our fifth-floor walk-up on Amsterdam and 106th, where he is immersed in ‘that horde of Darkseekers’ in more ways than one. His 100-page States is both photography and myth-breaking, a collection that will repay much re-reading; a full summer-long of reading.
‘The children of Pompeii should have listened/ to their elders, if not betters, who preached caution – beware of the god that tastes of goat’s milk, / the milk of that same goat will drench your city…’ writes Frank McGuinness, revered Donegal playwright and equally dedicated poet. His new collection, The River Crana, is dedicated to the memory of two dear friends and admirers, Tom Kilroy and Gerald Dawe. With them he shares a poetry of drama, political commentary and sacred places and The River Crana is heaving with human drama, with drifting desire, impatient love. In the very fine sequence ‘Touch, 1976’ he creates five scenarios of such need and love:
‘Is that all I can tell, the end of a night,
fellows in their cups, admitting that once
I lay with a man, another man’s arms,
A beautiful Yank who asked – will you stay?
Brief encounters and the failure of attachment are crucial obsessions, lovers that a poet watches walking away ‘not looking back, never again looking/ the length of his life and out of my own.’ The humanity, the sensitivity, in these poems is astonishing, nearly overwhelming, but such qualities will not be a surprise to those who know McGuinness’s work in theatre. Precisions and particulars create the propulsion in almost every McGuinness poem; the pleats in his mother’s skirt, the hands of Barbara Warren, the thermals and gloves of Gertrude Jekyll, Eileen Battersby in a UCD Anglo-Saxon class. These are the details that own the world ‘me not the full shilling,/ sentenced to admire the work of giants…’. Such beauty in this book, such challenges and importances in all three collections, launched on a warm day in Dublin, on a day when the poet Durcan went quiet.
These books are sitting on a chair beside me as I write, but for companions they have three other newly published collections by other Irish poets, Afric McGlinchey, Anne Rath and Noelle Lynskey. These other collections are a reminder of how extensive, embracing, individualistic, continuing, the world of poetry truly is. It continues. It continues. Wonderful poets die and are gathered up into the Pantheon of the great, but poetry as something happening in our daily lives continues with an unexpected energy. This creative energy is real, as real as air. At one time I had a discussion with my son when he was a Short Form Producer for Disney Europe about the possibility of making a short drama, maybe nine minutes long, let’s call it ‘Poemberg News’ or ‘Poemberg TV.’ A fast-paced, hectic-hectic, dynamic cut of interviews, blurbs and sales charts from publishers, with streaming segments/charts beneath the interviews on the rise and fall of poetic reputations since the 1640s, also panels and arguments about bookshops, agents, readings, demonstrations, protests, reviews, all compressed into 9 minutes like a segment of Bloomberg TV or CNBC. Just imagine how mad that would be. Who is writing the poetry of the real world, who is offering a bit-coin poetry, an ambiguous literary value, who is a fake, who is the real thing, the Warren Buffet of poetic value? I thought it would be a brilliant way to show the dynamism of poetry, at this very moment. A dynamism I felt at the Gallery Press launch and in the lively , scurrilous, gossiping discussions after Paul Durcan’s funeral Mass. it could be done but it would require shit-hot editors and marvellous sound engineers – as well as the oversight of a law firm.
I launched the collection, Ashe and Bone, by Anne Rath (published by the dynamic Revival Press) a few days ago in Cork City Libraries. The new Revival Press design is beautiful, it reminds me of the exquisite collections by Marvin Bell and Bill Merwin published by Atheneum of New York in the Seventies and Eighties. You never saw such a crowd as the crowd at Anne Rath’s launch, such a wonderful, buoyant crowd; and such huge sales of a book. Anne read brilliantly, with that authority and calm she has, as the audience listened, rapt and spellbound, to poems of illness and loss, of attachment and memory, of grief and renewal: ‘Let my prayer be a bowl/ spun from all that is broken,/ braided with sedge and seagrass,/ lined with the luminous lost. Oh, just perfect poems like ‘Twilight Thrush,’ ‘Dear Body’ and ‘The Banshee Wails.’ Afric McGlinchey launched her book at Waterstones in Cork recently, an unusual, amazing work called à la belle étoile; The odyssey of Jeanne Baré, published by Salmon Poetry in a book that must be one of the most beautiful poetry-book designs of the last decade, designed in this instance by Michael Ray. The entire collection is a sequence in celebration and exploration of the life of Jeanne Baré, the Frenchwoman who was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. She achieved this feat in the 1700s by disguising herself as a man. McGlinchey’s poems give Baré a voice. In ‘Slipknots, North Atlantic, 1767’ she writes:
‘My neck cloth hides the lack of a throat-ball,
I’ve grown goat-solid, the softness has sheered from my voice
And, so far, fortune is with me…’
The poems are wonderful, voiced as the ship moves through the Straits of Magellan, the Solomon Islands, Java and Samoa, all the while giving us the physicality and terror of life at sea intensified by the perils of gender. It is brilliant work.
Arlen House recently published Noelle Lynskey’s Featherweight, a beauty of a collection from a really accomplished poet who I met briefly in the churchyard after Paul Durcan’s funeral Mass (Ireland is, after all, a small place and the poetry community even smaller). The poems here are absolutely sure of their ground, poems of Portumna, of music (music is a crucial presence in the book), grandmothers and funerals, including the funeral of Edna O’Brien. But Lynskey is the poet of craft and music:
‘On Thursdays, the day for New Inn,
with imperfect perfection my trio pours into the car,
violin, viola and cello in a weekly divining
at the musical well.’
The metaphor is one of music and communal value, key components of Lynskey’s world view and a moral value that saturates this vibrant, life-affirming collection. Such jewels of poems: ‘Brown Coats,’ ‘Reeling Her in’ and ‘Carmen Cygni,’ it would be difficult to choose which one to love the most.
But six collections, and there are others, ones I haven’t brought upstairs to my library yet. I need to read more of the new Patrick Cotter collection, for example, and a new collection by the poet James Harpur, The Magic Theatre from Two Rivers Press. But these six new collections right now on the chair beside me, still un-shelved, they sing of a summer of high creativity. They are a reminder of how living, how breathing a thing, poetry is – it is as thistledown in the sunlight, or whitethorn blossom with which the hedgerows of Ireland are currently smothered. It insists itself into life with a circadian ferocity and certainty. It will not be silenced, especially by those who believe in just one canon of poetry, those who believe they should issue licenses. Our attitude to new poetry books should be one of welcome: a child has run in from the battlefield of this life, welcome, poet, sit here awhile beside me.
© Thomas McCarthy
Thomas McCarthy was born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated locally and at University College Cork. He was an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing programme, University of Iowa in 1978/79. He has published The First Convention (1978), The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Lost Province (1996), Merchant Prince (2005) and The Last Geraldine Officer (2009) as well as a number of other collections.
He has also published two novels and a memoir. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries, retiring in 2014 to write fulltime. He was International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994/95. He is a former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review.
He has also conducted poetry workshops at Listowel Writers’ Week, Molly Keane House, Arvon Foundation and Portlaoise Prison (Provisional IRA Wing). He is a member of Aosdana. His collections, Pandemonium and Prophecy, were published by Carcanet in 2016 and 2019. Last year Gallery Press, Ireland, published his sold-out journals, Poetry, Memory and the Party. Last year Gallery Press, Ireland, published his sold-out journals, Poetry, Memory and the Party. Gallery Press published his essays Questioning Ireland in September; and Carcanet published a new collection, Plenitude, in April 2025.
https://gallerypress.com/product/questioning-ireland/
, poems by Kate McNamara.