Pandemonium

During the dark, disturbed years after Ireland's economic collapse and humiliation in 2008, poet Thomas McCarthy retreated back into an intensely personal world where what was political took on an almost macabre, geological character. He returned as often as possible to the coast of County Kerry, laden with books and bundles of newspapers. The agitation of the Irish coastline, the winds off Mount Brandon beating upon the frail canvas of a tent he sometimes used, seemed a perfect metaphor for the financial and moral cataclysm, the pandemonium, now fallen upon a society that had so recently escaped from the tensions of the Ulster conflict. Here in poem after poem we find ‘the tide's scandalous incompetence,' as it works in parliament as well as upon the seashore. Here are poems of love and family, poems of travel, nights in L.A., Shanghai and London as well as Dingle and the Kerry seashore, but all the while there's is the poet's deep anxiety for his country; his knowledge that the universe may be at its best when spinning, but that the poet, like the bird of prey, must calmly await ‘the fertile hour blue as ink.'