‘My father’s father took his chance/on the first flight over Lisfannon.’ So begins a poem in Frank McGuinness’s eighth collection, The River Crana, a book equally at home in Donegal as Japan and ancient Illyria. His poems have been praised by Seán Hewitt in The Irish Times for their ‘dark contours and gothic atmosphere, their sensory detail and sly humour’ — traits clear in this new book in which ‘Buncrana, Christmas Eve’ is vividly evocative of the author’s home town in his childhood. From poems of empathy with the death of Sylvia Plath and the lost children of Pompeii, anything is possible: ‘I might yet learn,’ he writes, ‘to drive a lorry.’
A restless imagination . . . a writer of openness and adventure — especially, and consistently, to varieties of identity, political, gendered, sexual . . . original, entertaining, steadfast in their contemplation of colour and darkness. — Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Dublin Review of Books
'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…’. — Thomas McCarthy's review of The River Crana in Poetry & Writing
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The Miracle of Poems Getting Written
‘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…’.
— Thomas McCarthy, Poetry & Writing
Many of the poems in The River Crana move towards and away from revelation and confession – they paint scenes that offer self-exposure and dwell among the risks involved in finally taking the plunge. Touch, 1976 is a sequence of poems pivoting around a brief encounter with “the kind of guy you should not trust in bars” and its aftermath, from several perspectives (including the bed itself, in the slightly odder poem of the set).
McGuinness’s eye for portraiture, carnality and psychology all come to the fore in the telling, and his shifts of perspective allow for a bruised kind of empathy, “never again looking/the length of his life and out of my own”. Elsewhere we hear about “saviours who have lost the plot” and others “full of remorse/and craving compassion”.
It’s a various book, elegiac, playful and intertextual; McGuinness is fond of and adept at the dramatic monologue form, bringing in a whole chorus of unexpected voices, ably thrown, from the ancient world, Shakespeare and Maeve Binchy at Croagh Patrick.
His eye for the telling image, too, shines out, from Armenian orchards that “smell of pomegranates/the colour of veal” to lambs “licking us sticky clean as honeycomb”.
One of the sharpest poems, Lack of Sleep, also shows off his skill in form, and reaches for a kind of universalist timelessness – a note he also strikes in a touching version of Cavafy, Bandage, which is similarly rich in a sense of being vulnerably observant in the midst of all the action: “I liked looking,/looking at the blood/that belonged to him”.
— Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
Book Information
Publication date: 22 May 2025
Details: 120pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 898 7
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 899 4
Cover: ‘Path by a Large Tree’ by Mary Swanzy © Artist’s Estate
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