In his review of Michéal McCann’s Devotion Juliano Zaffino writes:
“I persist / regardless, against all advice.” This is the end of the first poem, ‘Song’, in Mícheál McCann’s first full-length collection of poetry, Devotion. . . At the heart of the book is the tremendous long-poem / sequence, ‘Keen for A—’, which adapts Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s famous eighteenth century lament . . . In McCann’s hands, the poem becomes a queer meditation on love, visibility, family, and justice — or rather the impossibility of justice under heteronormativity. There are so many staggering revelations in McCann’s ‘Keen’, not least about grief, which is captured so horribly palpably in the juxtaposition of “this vanishing act” with the imminence of a resurrection: “And with all this said, all of it, / I cannot abandon the sense / that you will beat me home, / feet up, sun lightening your eyes.” Its sensitivities stun but its rage is what really moved me, I felt it on an atomic level, how easy it is to hate the world that hates us. Yet the collection is propelled endlessly by love and goodness.
Poems like ‘Auden’s You’, which is not the only one to usurp time in the name of love: “The clock stopped going / as the morning approached. / Time damned its water flow.” And in the book’s titular poem, “Love and death are our inexhaustible topics. / The poets are unanimous. I pity them, though, never / knowing how your cheeks shine when you really laugh.” Without hyperbole, Devotion heralds McCann’s arrival as a poet of inevitable significance.
