Thomas McCarthy

[ Thomas McCarthy in conversation with Cliona Ni Riordain (Sorbonne) Wed., 18 June 2022 at Cork Arts Theatre - £5 entrance.]

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Poems in anthologies incl: “State Funeral”,“Mr Nabokov’s Memory” and “Persephone, 1978” in Modern Irish Poetry: An Antholog, ed. Patrick Crotty (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), pp.390-93 [attached]. Sundry contributions to journals incl. “The Dying Synagogue at South Terrace” and “Moonlight Cooler, 1948” [attached].

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Criticism
Articles, Gerald Dawe, ‘The Suburban Night: On Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan and Thomas McCarthy’, in Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, Elmer Andrews (London: Macmillan 1996), pp.168-93 [also printed in Dawe, Against Piety: Essays in Irish, Poetry 1995, p.169ff.]; James Naiden, interview with Thomas McCarthy, in New Hibernia Review, 3, 1 (March 1999) [q.pp.]

Reviews, Tom Redshaw, ‘Reflections of a gentleman’, review of Merchant Prince, in The Irish Times (25 June 2005), Weekend [infra]; Rory Brennan, review of Merchant Prince, in Books Ireland (April 2006), p.79; David Wheatley, ‘Humane Witnessing’, review of Poetry, Memory and the Party: Journals 1974-2014, in Times Literary Supplement (1 April 2022 [see extract]).

[ A continuous history of reviews can be met with in Poetry Ireland and other leading Irish and international literary reviews. ]

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Commentary
Nick Laird, review of Mr. Dineen’s Careful Parade: New and Selected Poems, in Times Literary Supplement, 12 May 20090, p.26. Speaks of continuity of vision and an ‘equable, regretful tone’; further, ‘the eschewal of rhetoric is impressive; quotes “State Funeral”, 1978: ‘It is a landscape for old men. Today/They lowered the tallest one, tidied him/Away while his people watched quiety.//I think of his austere grandeur;/Taut sadness, like old heroes he had imagined.’ Also cites and quotes from “A July Afternoon on Jameson’s Farm”, “November” (from The Lost Province, 1996); “The Provincial Writer’s Diary” (‘far from the heroic’); notes old fashioned timidity about some of these poems and matronly euphenisms (‘scents of summer’, and ‘fresh dog mess’), and calls the McCarthy a poet whose ‘early poetic promise has not quite been fulfilled’; quotes ‘our poor Republic’; ‘potholes’; ‘abrupt and botched revolution’; ‘liberation is a valley of disappointment’; remarks, ‘McCarthy is not a poet’s poet like Paul Muldoon, and compared to many of his contempoaries’ work - Matthew Sweeney’s hermetc, aggressive whimsies, the withering intelligence of Aidan Matthews [sic], - his can sem old-fashioned and, at times, gauche; but he has a strong voice very much his own, held steady at a medium pitch. His is a cautious celebration, a “careful parade” over common ground.’ [End; photo-port in tie.]

Theo Dorgan, RTE interview (Sunday 28 April 2002): McCarthy speaks of a mentally-ill father and strains of growing up with ‘an ill person’; death of both parents at 55 within 18 months; ‘my past was sealed’; f. worked in Cappoquin forestry; infl. by Denis Fitzgerald, and Anglo-Irish neighbour who encouraged him to read Stendhal and Gide; speaks of the Anglo-Irish world of the Keane’s, the Cavendishes, the Geraldines [Fitzgeralds], and of Drimnagh and Villierstown and notes that Kim Philby was minded in Cappa in 1956; ed. The Turning Tide for Waterford Co. Council; infl. by Professor O’Kelly, archaeologist, at UUC; speaks with praise of John Montague; notes impact of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s essay on Sean O’Faolain and literary Parnellism [Maria Cross]; ‘people who don’t play sport in rural Ireland have got the option of joining Fianna Fáil’; professes belief in life after death and reacquaintance with deceased loved ones.

Tom Redshaw Dillon, ‘Reflections of a gentleman’, review of Merchant Prince, in The Irish Times (25 June 2005), Weekend: ‘McCarthy’s readers will discover, however, that Merchant Prince is thoroughly modern as well as Modernist, given the Romanticism native to Nathaniel Murphy, McCarthy’s chosen persona. McCarthy handles this persona as tellingly as John Berryman did, for example, in his Dream Songs , but in a far different idiom. Indeed, Merchant Prince combines McCarthy’s signal strengths of invention and empathy - strengths displayed so well in prose and verse in Gardens of Remembrance (1998) and in Mr Dineen’s Careful Parade (1999). [.... &c.] (See full text in RICORSO Library, Criticism, full text.)

David Wheatley, ‘Humane Witnessing’, review of Poetry, Memory and the Party: Journals 1974-2014 , in Times Literary Supplement (1 April 2022): ‘Thomas McCarthy has long been the most civic-spirited of Irish poets. The author of ten poetry collections since The First Convention in 1978, he has been a prolific diarist too, and in Poetry, Memory and the Party he offers a compelling record of poetry and politics in Ireland over the past half century, from the early days of the Troubles to the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath.

Wheatley, review of Poetry, Memory and the Party - cont.: ‘McCarthy’s life is decisively shaped by the early death of his parents, and by his sense of cultural impoverishment in a world where “the poor don’t participate in a public realm”. From the outset he is horrified by the activities of the Provisional IRA and voices strong support for Conor Cruise O’Brien, who banned Republicans from the airwaves. His work as a gardener at Glenshelane House in Waterford shapes his sympathy for the Irish Protestant tradition, or its conservative-Unionist strain at least, in line with his own “profoundly conservative” politics. / These place him at odds with northern poets such as Ciaran Carson, who had strong words for McCarthy when he toasted the Queen at an academic conference in Belfast. Despite his resolve to go beyond southern pieties in engaging with the North, McCarthy is consistently aghast at the “Ulsterisation” of Irish poetry he finds in anthologies such as Paul Muldoon’s Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986), which almost completely excludes writers from the Republic. / A central figure in McCarthy’s life is John Montague, who stalks these pages like a maddened King Lear on the heath, desperate for reassurance and recognition. As early as 1980, Montague is driven to drink by paranoid fears that his younger rival Seamus Heaney will one day win the Nobel prize. McCarthy describes Montague being filmed reading at the launch of one of his books, after which it is discovered that the cameraman had forgotten to insert a film cartridge; “somehow this seems a metaphor for Montague’s literary life”. / McCarthy is intimately involved in Cork’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2005, a joyous if bruising experience. But the public realm is his natural element, and a retreat to “inner émigré” status is never an option. His humane witnessing in these diaries offers an invaluable commentary on modern Irish literary life. [...].’ (Available online.)

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Quotations

Poetry

“The Standing Trains”: [epigraph “… and I thought how wonderful to miss / one’s connections; / soon I shall miss them / all the time.” (Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False): ‘From the windows of a standing train / you can judge the artwork of our poor Republic. / The prominent ruins that make Limerick Junction / seem like Dresden in 1945. and the beaten-up coaches at Mallow Station, / the rusted side-tracks at Charleville, / have taken years of independent thought. / It takes decades to destroy a system / of stations. On the other hand, a few / well-placed hand-signals can destroy a whole / mode of life, a network of happiness. / This is our own Republic! O Memory, / O Patria, the shame of silenced junctions. / Time knew we’d rip the rails apart, we’d sell / emigrant tickets even while stripping the ticket-office bare. / The standing trains / of the future were backed against a wall. // Two hens peck seed from the bright platform, / hens roost in the signal-box. / Bilingual signs that caused a debate in the Senate / have been unbolted and used as gates: / it’s late summer now in this dead station. / When I was twelve they unbolted the rails. / Now there’s only the ghost of my father, / standing by the parcel-shed with his ghostly / suitcase, When he sees me walking towards him / he becomes upset. Don’t stop here! he cries. Keep going, keep going! This place is dead. (Rep. in Patrick Crotty, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology, Blackstaff 1995, pp.393-94.)

“The Dying Synagogue at South Terrace”: ‘Chocolate-coloured paint and the July sun like a blow-torch peeling off / the last efforts of love. / More than time has abandoned this, / God’s abandonment, God’s synagogue, / that rose out of the ocean / one hundred years from here. / The peeling paint is an emigrant’s / guide to America - lost on the shore / at Cobh, to be torn and scored / by a city of luftmenshen; / Catholics, equally poor, equally driven. [...; see full text in RICORSO, Library, Authors, infra.]

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“Moonlight Cooler 1948”: ‘It was the four frosted tiki-stem cocktail glasses, / Survivors of a disreputable Irish bar in Minneapolis, / That you were most proud of on the day / Of the Ballysaggart races; that day when a man / Claiming to be Bing Crosby, or Bing’s brother, / Walked into the pub with a Fine Gael Senator. [...] they mentioned / The word “cocktail”, thinking to embarrass us all [...]. Sure every baptised Christian in the county knew, / In them days, that on a moonlit evening in November / Two ladies on the way to dinner at a Big House / Would have the juice of one lemon, a little sugar, / Two Irish ounces of Calvados, and soda; all / Shaken with a bit of ice from O’Connor’s fish store / And strained into - pardon the lack of highballs - Your tiki-stem cocktail glasses fit for any Bing.’ [See full text in RICORSO, Library, Authors, infra.]

“The Euro”: ‘I’ve seen the first photography of the new Euro / in a shop-window in Patrick Street. / Rather than anything that belongs to the future ,/ it reminds me of the orange ten-shilling note / of my childhood … that held the promise of so much happiness … there is a small boy of ten - a child with coins - / for whom the Euro will come with a sudden pain of optimism, a sunbeam // to illuminate the cleared path ahead. / I have high hopes for that boy. I honour him.’ (The Irish Times, 6 Oct. 2001, Weekend.)

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“Age and Creativity”

McCarthy writes on Facebook: ‘A poem in the Irish Times today, always a lovely place to have a poem published on a Saturday morning. Illness and age have been on my mind in the last few years, accentuated by amazing and stimulaing discussions we’ve been having with the Arts Council around supports for artists and writers as they age. Gottfried Benn and Louis Bourgeois are my core theorists on the creativity of Late Age, their insights on why as the scaffolding weakens the buildings of the mind remain upright. Remaining upright to the end in most cases, I think. At the moment I’m thinking of the wonderful Stanley Moss or Edna O’Brien and the great long endurance of an artistic life, so brilliantly analysed in terms of its meaning by that German pessimist Gottfried Benn. Anyway, this lyric hang on the edge of a lot of theorising and discussion we’ve all been having over the last two years.’ (22.09.2018.)

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Prose

“Cork Poetry in Its Wider Context”: ‘Poetry, whether written in Irish or English, is not just a language: it’s a personal language, intimately bound up with the speaking voice and personal atmosphere of a poet. A poetic voice is not something that can be transferred or taught. But it can be encouraged, enabled, empowered by fine example and the reading of literary magazines and poetry collections. A public library is one of the best places for the aspiring poet to find recent work, in both books and magazines. Cork has been particularly blessed with the publication of two crucial journals, Poetry Ireland, edited by David Marcus in the 1940s and Innti, edited by Micheal Davitt in the 1970s. [.... &c.; see full text in RICORSO Library, infra.]

“Why I Write” - online article at Laoise Education Centre, [2006]: ‘[...] I think of books as radios or televisions that have been flattened for storage or convenience. When the cover of a book is lifted it’s like switching on a radio or television. Imagine, when you open a book, that the cover is a kind of a power-pack or solar-panel that makes the book receive signals from far away. When I go into a library or a bookshop now I think of all those books as radio programmes, full of voices and opinions. You know, literature was really the first successful multichannel company, the first broadcasting corporation. The voices in books are honest, funny sometimes, rich and brilliant.’ [...; see full text in RICORSO Library, Authors, infra]

Birthday thoughts (Facebook, 6 March 2017) - “The repair of a tapestry or a costume is precisely a plea in favour of a second chance.” (quoted from:] Louise Bourgeois Diary 29th Oct 1995): ‘Thanks to all my terrific FB friends who sent birthday greetings my way today. Today was a particularly brilliant day as I had my first drive in a TESLA motor-car this morning. I noticed it parked near my house in Montenotte and, recognising the distinctive TESLA marque I went over to look at it, While circling round it, I heard the owner shouting my name: “Tom, do you want a spin into town?” Away we went. What a beautiful machine, built by that troubled genius Elon Musk. But, after that thrill, most of the day was spent reading the diaries of the artist Louise Bourgeois. Her thoughts are extraordinary: the angst and depth in her aesthetic is profound and tragic and very Beckett-like. Her thoughts remind me about the human compulsions and imperatives behind any artistic life. She reminds me that art is a place where we can repair the damage done to others by our selfishness and thoughtless profanity and our ill-feeling. She once wrote that she couldn’t resist repairing things, and she went on to say “The repair of a tapestry or a costume is precisely a plea in favour of a second chance.” I think this is what art must be, then, what it’s impulse must be - to give us a second chance in our lives perpetually, to let us go back over the half-worn materials of our biography so that we might live again as we should have lived in the first place. I think all of writing is therapeutic in that strict therapeutic sense, it allows us to go over things and make them settle permanently inside our settled personality. It gives our souls a second chance to heal through a deliberate misremembering, through the construction of a long, calm story of the self. It turns experiences if not into stone at least into the protective leather of artifice, the outer shell of a very mediated life. When I look at a giant bronze sculpture of a maternal spider by Louise Bourgeois or when I listen to an orchestra playing the Andante of Tancredi by the young Rossini or when I hear Maria Joao Pires playing Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major, I recognise instantly what poetry is, what art is. I am transported back to a point at which poetry begins. It has something to do with starting-points. I first recognised this starting point when I was a child on a May evening listening to the voice of Canon Sidney MacEwan singing ‘Bring Flowers of the Rarest: Queen of the May’ as it came through from loudspeakers placed in the trees of Cappoquin; and I recognised this still pulsing away compellingly just yesterday as I held an umbrella for my wife Catherine as she tried to photograph the branch of a handkerchief-tree in a torrential rainstorm at Fota House. The rain lashed down upon us, but the lovely Canon camera and its mistress zoomed in upon the bare branches and brown fruit bulbs and swallowed the wet world whole. There are moments when time stands still in our lives and the hand of God is near us, practically gifting us new works of art. Sometimes I think only great sculpture captures this intense feeling, but I come from a very poor family and art training was beyond our means in childhood. Words are the only art materials I had available to me and I learned to mix them into my own therapeutic colours. This is why it’s worth staying alive for as long as we can and drinking off the available light. And why I thank you for those birthday wishes. These thoughts began this morning in the front seat of a TESLA.’

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On James Barry, “Self-Portrait as Timanthes”, in Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art, ed. Janet McLean [1850-1950 Curator at National Gallery of Ireland] (London: Thames & Hudson 2014), pp.131-35: ‘All through the 1990s each train journey I made because a pilgrimage to this one painting I visited Dublin regularly to attend board meetings at Poetry Ireland, a national organisation that was then expanding its influence under its revolutionary director, the poet Theo Dorgan. [...] We must all stand back from work and feel ashamed that we have not done more for art and truth. Scholars have construed the loosened black ribbon on Barry"s neck as the shadow of the guillotine, the fate that awaits all counter-revolutionaries. I beg to [131] disagree. I"ve never thought that. Surely it is art unbuttoned, bindings loosened, the break of life upon an exposed neck. [... /] Nothing painted by Barry was ever flawless - his drawing of hands is always poor - yet every oil of his contained more ambiguous brilliance and politics than anything by Reynolds or Fuseli. (See! Just a few minutes with Barry and I am making aggressive and unsupported observations!) He conversed only in extremities and his ambition for British art were unhinged by the breadth of his vision. He was an Irishman, yet he wanted the best for the English mind. His Lodon efforts to extract the best from British possibilities would destroy him mentally and vocationally. This is the portrait of an artist who has suffered from an extreme ambition. the eyes tell us that he has painted himself into a corner. Here, the artist as a cornered Timanthes marks a point of irreversible decline in the fortunes of the painters. Despite the exceptional kindness of friends in the Royal Society of Arts, Barry would isolate hismelf and retreat down the Thames to Greenwich, into a house with broken windows and darkened printing presses. / Nearly a decade has passed since we all stood around the plaque in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral in London to commemorate the bicentenary of Barry’s death. Now, the scholar William Presley’s words are ringing in my ears: his belief that Barry’s huge wall paintings in the Ryal Society’s Great Room are actually a piece of sustained Roman Catholic propaganda: Great art forces us to grapple with its contents, rather than meremly mook and say “oh” and move on.But I’m not sure it matters, or let me put it another way: it doesn"t matter to me. I ‘m never too worried about what art means; I’ve always been more conscious of what it does to me, what is says in a human way. I’m constantly saying “oh” and refusing to move on. [...] This is a deeply personal work of art; it is full of yearning and human wariness. It is very much a metaphor for an artistic life of any kind. And it doesn’t have a citizenship or a religion: we are all hunted, as Timanthes was, and we all nervously awaiting our destiny, as Barry constantly was. I feel for him and I feel for this painting because I know his luck ran out several times. I still love to come upon it. It speas to me of mnay lost connections and that foolish yearning to hurry up and finish some all-consuming work of art. / This painting is one of the gems of our National Gallery It is worth taking any long journey to coe upon this triumph of antiquity and revolution, of political camouflage and artistic nakedness. When I stand by this painting my resolve as a poet stiffs and y political faith in the artistic life is restored completely.’ [End.]

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References
Andrew Carpenter & Peter Fallon, eds., The Writers: A Sense of Place (Dublin: O’Brien Press 1980), incls. ‘Bachelard’s Images’, pp.112-14 [with photo-port.].

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Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects ‘A Meeting with Parnell’; ‘Windows’ from from The Sorrow Garden; also ‘Black Flags at a Party Meeting’, ‘The Non-Aligned Story-Teller’ from The Non-Aligned Story-Teller [1424-26]; BIOG, 1436.

Anthologies, Patrick Crotty, Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), selects “State Funeral” [390-91], “Mr Nabokov’s Memory” [392-92], “Persephone” [392-93], “Standing Trains” [393-94; infra].

Catalogues, &c.
CCLIB archive contains record supplied by author: b. 06/03/54, Co. Waterford; ed. St. Annes High School, Cappequin; University College Cork 1973-76 BA. HDE; University of Iowa (International Writing Programme), 1978-79; Librarian at Cork City Libraries 1978- . Works: The First Convention Dolmen Press 1978) [manuscript in possession of Brigadier D.H. Fitz-Gerald, Cappoquin Co. Waterford]; The Sorrow-Garden (Anvil Poetry, September 1981) [manuscript in possession Brigadier D.H. Fitz-Gerald]; The Non-Aligned Storyteller (Anvil Poetry 1984) [manuscript with author]; Seven Winters in Paris (Anvil Poetry 1989) [withdrawn because of major print error], Do., rep. (Dedalus 1990) [manuscript with author]. Fiction, Without Power (Poolbeg Press 1991), novel, rep. (1991) [manuscript with author]; Asya and Christine (Poolbeg Press 1992) [manuscript with author]; selected among 15 years of reviewing, ‘In A Nutshell’. - Review of ‘The Faber Book of Epigrams’, Irish Times (Oct 1, 1970 [first public review]; ‘Down to Earth in a Poets Garden’ an interview with Ciarán Carty, Sunday Independent (Oct 23 1977); ‘Roethke’ [review of Harry Williams, ‘Theodore Roethke After’], Irish Times (March 24-25 1978); ‘Tides Revisited’ [review of John Montague’s Tides], Irish Times (17 June 1978); ‘Poet’s Cloak’ [review of John Montague, The Great Cloak’, Irish Times 1978; ‘Northern Voices’ [ review of Michael Longley, Echo-Gate, Irish Times (9 Feb 1990); ‘Colonial Consciousness in Commonwealth Literature’ [interview with Peter Nazareth], Somaiya Publications [?Put], Ltd Bombay/New Delhi 1984), pp.128-173; ‘Heaney’s Sweeney’ [review of Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray’ Connaught Tribune [December 23 1983]; ‘Recent Poetry’ [review of Paul Durcan, Gerard Smith, Desmond Egan], Irish Times (Feb 25 1984); Review of The Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Glan Heuer (OUP), and Grandmother & Wolfe Tone by Hubert Butler [Lilliput Press 1990] in The Irish Review [n.d.; 1990]; ‘Sean Ó Faolain at the Dinner Table’ [eminiscences of Sean Ó Faolain at American Embassy Dinner], in Cork Review (November 1991); ‘Why Politics World Have Been Wrong Choice’ [interview with Helen Conghlan about fiction and politics], Waterford News and Star (September 4 1992); ‘Fine Summer Afternoons’ [autobiographical essay on writing and student life at UCC], Eire-Ireland, 26: I (Spring 1991), pps 7-18; ‘Walking into America, Journal 1978 [diary kept while attending Iowa Writing Programme], The North Store Review (Fall/Winter 1992), pp.132-151; ‘The State of Poetry’ [contribution to a feature on the state of poetry in AGENDA Vol 22 no.3 [n.d.], pp.49-51; ‘James Simmons and Martin Luther in the Larne District’, J. Simmons 60th Birthday in Larne Press; ‘Gerry Adams & Political Fictions’ [interview with Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin for Stet Magazine, Cork (December 1993). [Centre for Irish Literature & Bibliography, Coleraine.]

Anvil Press Poetry lists Thomas McCarthy, Mr Dineen’s Careful Parade ( 1999) [0 85646 320 5]; The Non-Aligned Storyteller (1984) [0 85646 123 7].

Laoise Education Centre website has a Thomas McCarthy webpage [& online and as infra].

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Notes
Merchant Prince (2009) presents two groups of poems, set largely in Cork, and a novella set in Italy, in the period from 1769 and 1831. They tell the story of Nathaniel Murphy: his training for the priesthood, the loss of his virginity and vocation, his flight from Italy, and later his happy marriage and successful career as a Cork merchant. The unusual mixture of verse and prose and the meticulously imagined history - replete with portraits of such great figures as the painter James Barry, and four Italian poets who are strangely reminiscent of certain contemporary Irish poets - gives the book a compelling flavour. Poems and prose combine in a poetic fiction which is, among other things, a meditation on the craft of verse and the artistic calling, and a restoration project on a kind of Irishness overwritten by later history. (COPAC summary - online.)

The Last Geraldine Officer (London: Anvil Press Poetry 2009): The first part of the book collects recent short lyrics. Part Two daringly recreates a forgotten period in the Anglo-Irish world: a Big House in the years between the World Wars, a FitzGerald (‘Geraldine’) family that has tilled the soil of County Waterford, absorbed its language and history, and sent young men back to British regiments, particularly the Irish Guards. Focusing on his Gaelic-speaking soldier-poet, Sir Gerald FitzGerald, and his man-servant, Paax Foley, McCarthy creates a fully imagined landscape of men escaped from Irish neutrality to fight against Fascism. Moving from ballad to prose poem, from mid-century Gaelic verse to County Waterford recipes, McCarthy mixes competing loyalties and readings of Irish history to create a single Irish narrative of exile and bereavement, of battles won and love lost and found. (COPAC summary - online.)

Asya and Christine (1993) follows the story of FF man Paudie Glenville from 1925; married to Adele Griffith with five children, since arriving in Cappoquin in 1924; having been a smuggler of Irregulars to the US, he retains some funds with the connivance of the authorities; by 1943 he is a respected TD; he is called to intercede with Eamon de Valera on behalf of a man threatened with execution at the risk of exposing the source of his wealth, now invested; de Valera refuses; the novel ends in remorse with the death of his own son; Aysa is the Jewish girl who looks after their children. (See review, Fortnight, March 1993 - narrative questions concerning Christine and others unanswered.)

Pandemonium (2016) - book notice: Written in the wake of Ireland’s 2008 economic collapse, Pandemonium moves between lament and protest in search of a meaningful response in language. Many of the poems were written during a period of retreat along Ireland’s south-west coast, a landscape that imbues McCarthy’s politics with geological intensity. The Atlantic horizon ‘where the sun lies down in the west to die’ is mirrored inland by corruption and rot, a modern Ireland beset, in the poet’s eyes, by financial and moral pandemonium. McCarthy’s subtle satiric wit and understated lyricism preserve raw outrage as historical document. His poems register the moral ire of many during a pivotal era of Irish history, leading with the poet’s only weapon, the word - ‘the ink trail that pain makes on the page’. Greeted for ‘[its] urgent, involving and rewarding poems [which] make us question where we have come from and look again at where we are going’ (The Irish Times). See also Dublin Review of Books: ‘His voice - with its idiosyncratic tone and verbal texture - registered firmly as one of the most distinctive and it is now one of the most authoritative among poets of his generation. The weight of that authority and his mastery of a personal tone are evident in this fine new collection.’ See COPAC - online [erroneously cites his Cork library post as dating from 1987 [recte 1978].

Poetry, Memory and the Party Journals 1974-2014 (2022): Forty years of intimate details of Thomas McCarthy’s life lived between a modest background and the ‘Big House’ of West Waterford and his immersion in the literary life of Cork against the troubles of a changing Ireland by one of Munster’s leading poets. Though a student of John Montague and Seán Lucy at UCC, Thomas McCarthy’s weekends still belonged to West Waterford and the Victorian garden that he was replanting for its owner, Brigadier Denis FitzGerald, a grandson of the Duke of Leinster. Aware of the poverty of his own family background and conscious of the contrasting local Anglo-Irish world of the Brigadier, Molly Keane and W. E. D. Allen, he began to keep a diary in order to make these worlds cohere. Here are the elements of survival in an everyday Fianna Fáil society. Here is a poet’s life with its travels, encounters, youthful excitements, hyperbole and frustrations. Here are detailed encounters with Terence de Vere White, Robert Graves and Seamus Heaney, with the legendary Paul Engle at Iowa, with IRA prisoners and with Harold Macmillan’s Private Secretary. Here also is the life of Ireland as it unfolds over forty years of turmoil, politics, publishing and art. (Notice on Molly Keane House - Writers Retreat website - online; accessed 19.08.2024.)

James Barry: McCarthy contributed a piece on Barry to Lines of Visions: Irish Writers On Art (2104) - writing of his self-portrait as Timanthes, ‘When I stand by this painting my resolve as a poet stiffens.

Molly Keane House, Ardmore - Writers Retreat: McCarthy conducted a two-day workshop on the lyric poem as “The Very Brief Lyric Poem of 2023” at the Molly Keane House Ardmore, Co. Waterford, 13th May and 2nd Sept. [Sats.], 2023. Also “Roaring into the Twenties”, (14th May and 3rd Sept.) - a writers’ workshop and talk on Molly Keane as part of the three-day course entitled “The Sensuality of Memory” facilitated by Lani O’Hanlon at the Molly Keane Writers Retreat [online; accessed 19.08.2024].

Namesakes: Thomas McCarthy (b.1941), ed., with Mike Gerrard, Vengeance!: Passport Anthology (Serpent’s Tail 1993) [208]pp. [stories] and and Passport to Arabia (Serpent’s Tail 1993) [copies in TCD Library]. Note also, Do. [Thomas McCarthy], author of Finals Day and Other Stories (Cambridge Poetry Workshop [2002]) and other works incl. A Fine Country (London: Citron 2002), 229pp. [suspense fiction dealing with the IRA], &c. A Thomas McCarthy is a translator of Jürgen Habermas and a literary critic, author of Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge UP 2009) and other works.

Munster Writers: Thomas McCarthy appeared in In the Hands of Erato - a documentary produced and directed by Liz O’Donoghue for Munster Arts Centre in 2003 - reciting his poetry likewise featuring Greg Delanty, Patrick Cotter, Conal Creedon, Trevor Joyce, Patrick Galvin, Theo Dorgan, Louis De Paor, John Montague, Roz Cowman, Robert O’Donoghue, Rosemary Canavan, Gerry Murphy, Gregory O’Donoghue, Aíne Miller and Liz O’Donoghue. Original music and soundtrack by Martin Moylett. Camera, sound and editing by Dave Whelan. Additional editing by Neil Patrick McCarthy. Copyright held by Liz O’Donoghue. (Aug. 2018).Available at YouTube - online; accessed 19.08.2024.)

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