Terry McDonagh Knihy

Format Paperback Subject Poetry English Irish Scottish Welsh Publisher Syracuse Univ Pr

Exploring themes of displacement and memory, this poetry collection captures Terry McDonagh's journeys through rural Ireland, Germany, Australia, and Britain. His storytelling weaves together vivid imagery and reflections on the streets and people he encounters, creating a tapestry of lyrical observations. The language flows with a unique rhythm, reminiscent of casting flat stones into a river, blending the real and imagined in a celebration of his true, albeit dislocated, sense of home.

Carl aus Hamburg, 14-jähriger Sohn eines Irländers und einer Deutschen, verbringt seine Sommerferien bei den Verwandten in Irland. Dort lernt er bei seiner Cousine Kate in Dublin ihre beste Freundin Liz kennen, mit der er sich sehr gut versteht. Er reist weiter in den Westen Irlands, wo er mit seinen Großeltern und seinem besten Freund Shane eine schöne Zeit verlebt. Sein Vater kommt ihn an seinem 15. Geburtstag besuchen und plötzlich ändert sich alles. Wird Carl sein neues Leben mögen?

AuszugThe experience of becoming put into song and picture – the persistence of an evening blackbird belling a spring twilight – the exile at home in his away, away in his home, and seeking images to hold the spaces in-between – the surrender to the imagination immersed in the bogginess of place, in the certainties of place, in the absences of place – creating in the uncertain, a bright darkness of the spirit mind, the fairy mound, the woman Mary Hynes perhaps turning the corner on the road ahead. Yeats said it is “always necessary to affirm and reaffirm that nationality is in the things that escape analysis.” In this personal journey away from and back, and away again and again, Terry McDonagh reaffirms things that escape our analysis in growing up, especially that extraordinary clasp on the psyche of birthplace and places where we have lived. His words will echo in some readers’ memories, or create images for others. Sally McKenna hears in these lines echoes of youth and age; and responds here with images that carry through a lifetime; from brightly coloured celebrations to those delicate swirlings of the ash, thornbush and oak, from her abstract or surreal insights to the actuality of people on the land, within the landscape. All her pictures discover the poet’s place. Here, in conversing word and picture, is Cill Aodáin of the mind, Cill Aodáin of all our minds on this ancient island where our tribes blooded land and people for affirmation, for generation. Today we journey along a new and technologically washed terrain. Holding what we have made and not losing what we have been offered by our past is difficult in slippery seasons. The poet or the painter is always transformed by making art, but not simply so; the words and the images become in turn agents of transformation, changing the air we breathe and the hills we walk. But things unveiled for us through art can open our brave new world, can r eveal that place our bodies come from, where our souls are shaped. We can chant its past, we can seed its future, we can be, here in our own places. Some seek elsewhere. For others, and for this poet, elsewhere becomes at the end of the day ‘nowhere else’ but where it all began. The sense of place, and its possibilities for the imagination, especially places we have flown from only to return again and again – ‘these are the tufts of delight in the dark muddle of November.’ Here we may live our lives of ‘sin and wrinkles’ and walk to ‘Benediction’. Echoes offer tribute to the great Anthony Raftery of his home place, and also to a poet of our own time, Austin Clarke for whom men “Drank deep and were silent.”. McDonagh is not silent; and he promises to finish his poem, one way or another, in this life or the next. Cill Aodáin is why. Seamus Cashman

AuszugA FEW WORDS In some respects this book is an attempt to round off a chapter of my life that began about thirty years ago. As facts and fiction about Hamburg have been written and re-written, I thought it might be fitting to try conveying my impressions of the city in poetry, prose and drama – fragments of contemporary life as I see it. It’s late summer. I’m on my bike by the Elbe watching the compelling sun sink over us like a silent vigil – like good lyrics. I’d love a group photo but we’d lose each other in the crush, and most of us are too fragile to be left to ourselves. Time is at my window and I’m about to open the shutters to see if the nature of the city can be revealed through the eyes of an outsider. Perhaps my lens can be wider for this very reason. On a good day I wake up seeing flocks of eighty-year-old couples handin-hand on every bridge and street corner. On a bad day it’s raining; there are grumbling bureaucrats, half-hidden behind desks, and clientsstruggling for the right word or pleasing phrase. I love the dizziness of streetlights in the city the way I might fear them, if I were a beast on a busy country road in wet November. I sometimes occupy my father’s, my grandfather’s and my great-grandfather’s housein Ireland – and all of their lights have gone out. Now, there’s athought! My pen and I have become lovers. Let’s see where it takes me. St. Nikolai, Patron Saint of sailors, come to my aid.