John McAuliffe
John McAuliffe’s new book continues to explore a contemporary life whose domestic spaces and routines are lovingly itemized and reassembled: these poems tell stories and find images for ‘soul-making’ in the everyday world of sheds, swimming pools, concert halls, parks, ferry ports, galleries, protest marches, cinemas and street corners.
And The Way In also ranges further into ‘public’ life in a central sequence which brings its reader off the beaten path on a tour of Ireland and England: that sequence, ‘Home, Again’, combines autobiography and travel writing as it probes the countries’ shared history, borrowing the form of Edmund Spenser’s ‘Colin Clout’s Come Home Again’ as it summons the ghosts of those who haunt the places it visits.
These are open, vividly imagined poems which speak directly to readers as they look to find ‘A way of answering / to a day, to years of them, that we step into and speak up for’.
Details: 88pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 85235 630 0
ISBN HBK: 978 1 85235 631 6
€11.95
€18.50