Poetry

Many these poems respond to current events of the past twenty years, others take a longer view, exploring how the past and the recent past resonate in the most mundane aspects of everyday life; a kind of condensed open conversation with the turbulent times we live in.

These poems are about love and loss, the burden of memory, culture and ancestry. They journey through bereavement and heartbreak and back eventually to normality. The gloom is leavened here and there with occasional humour, as in life.

War is the linking theme in this patchwork of poetic monologues. Historical figures from the Crusades to the Napoleonic Wars are interspersed with fictional characters in a meditation on the pity and relentlessness of human conflict. This collection started life as a conventional novel and gradually morphed into poems making up a novella.

These poems are little landscapes, the intimations of a moment, capturing the small things we might glimpse out of the corner of an eye, and then forget a minute later.

The Irish language disappeared from Co. Clare at the beginning of the twentieth century but its rhythms and sensibility lie behind much of our speech and ways of thinking and with it the resonance of the old Gaelic tales of heroes and supernatural beings. Sí-Orphans (fairy orphans) gives voice to the female figures, real and mythological, who feature in that heritage but whose stories are not usually told from their own point of view.