Prophecy Poems

Following his acclaimed Pandemonium, Thomas McCarthy’s Prophecy dwells on childhood memory, romantic love, and the varieties of human attachment. There are poems on illness and recovery, ageing and creativity. From the community well of his childhood home in County Waterford to the holy well and pilgrim site of St Gobnait’s in County Cork, the poet finds that the act of remembering is an act of making and understanding. ‘All this / Metaphor and trauma and formal technique / I place in my canvas travel bag,’ he writes. ‘Along with Paul Muldoon,’ suggested Dennis O’Driscoll, McCarthy is ‘the most important Irish poet of his generation.’

Thomas McCarthy was born in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, in 1954 and educated locally and at University College Cork where he was auditor of the English Literature Society. He has published many collections of poetry, including The First Convention, The Sorrow Garden, Lost Province, Merchant Prince and The Last Geraldine Officer. He has also published three novels, Without Power, Asya and Christine as well as two works of non-fiction, Gardens of Remembrance and Out of the Ashes. His Pandemonium was published by Carcanet Press in 2016 and was short-listed for the Irish Times/Poetry Now Award. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Assembly of artists and writers. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award.