Award winning Newcastle West poet Mike Mac Domhnaill will launch his latest collection of poetry “Forgiving Moon” from Revival Press on this Friday. He is pictured with Seamus Mac Conmara, Dominic Taylor (Revival Press, Limerick), Aileen Ní Dhuilláin and Carmel Mac Domhnaill in Newcastle West on Monday last. – Photo George Daly
Mike Mac Domhnaill was joined by his wife Carmel, Jim Mac Namara, Aileen Dillane and the publisher Dominic Taylor to launch his latest collection of poetry, “Forgiving Moon”. Due to Covid-19 res-trictions the official launch will be via Zoom on this Friday night at 7.30pm. Anyone wishing to join can go to the Limerick Writers’ Centre website, limerickwriterscentre.com where the link is available.
Best-selling author Donal Ryan is lavish in his praise of the collection:
“This gorgeously honed and sculpted collection, wrought with a graceful, lyrical intensity, is several things at once: a paean to the pagan wilds of the poet’s native place; an elegy to a fading rural milieu; an indictment of our complex, contradictory, aberrant sense of nationhood; a tender, yearning testimony to ordinary lives lived well, or wasted, or stolen; a loving lament for heroes gone.
Mike MacDomhnaill casts his eye, now in tenderness, now in fury, always with love and a blazing intelligence, along the Arra River, up and out across our fractured land, our hungry fields and into a world darkened by injustice, riven by struggle, lit by hope, and back again to our heart’s core, where a man might stand, holding a telephone, offering a morsel of voice to sustain you through the night; this is a beautiful and important work of art.”
– Donal Ryan, author of Strange Flowers, Easons Novel of the Year.
Themes
The theme of under-standing and forgiveness runs through much of the work and in the poem “Forgive” he regrets his own silly words at the age of four when a kind man called to sympathise on his father’s death at the family home in Clouncagh.
He pays homage in the poems to people who have passed on like Mary Lynch-Keogh, Killoughteen, a self-taught artist, to Annie O’Mahony, Bishop Street and to Mary Carmody, Templeglantine, community activist. He also remembers his political sparring partner, but good friend, Brian Madden and his neighbour Eamonn O’Connell, headmaster extraordinaire.
Needless to say, Michael Hartnett enters some of the poems.
He reminds us of nature’s wonders and worries about climate change but registers hope in the broad human family.
The book may be ordered online from Dominic Taylor of Revival Press at Limerick Writers’ Centre, Tel: 087 2996409; E: limerickwriterscentre@gmail.com. One can go directly to the website, limerickwriterscentre.com
Locally the book is available at Hayes’, The Square and at O’Mahonys, Limerick. Or one may contact the author at: mikemacd6@gmail.com