Michael gets to heart of life in moving poetry collection

During his early childhood, the person Michael Gorman spent most time with was his maternal grandmother. The strength of his relationship with her and with his home place of Sligo shines forth form his latest poetry collection, the simply entitled Fifty Poems.

Published by Letterfrack based Artisan House Publishing and with the cover illustration by artist Joe Boske, it is a beautiful book in every sense.

The poems, some new and some published elsewhere previously, paint a picture of Irish life – as lived in Sligo, in Michael’s adopted home of Galway and among London’s emigrant community where he spent several years as a younger man.

“Pretensions didn’t laugh long where I grew up,” he remarks with a laugh about his writing, which is rich in humanity, humour, occasionally anger and always insight.

The many subjects Michael embraces include soccer – he’s a huge fan – and tailoring.  The soccer can be found in a poem such as Nor Was I Present, in which he movingly depicts his father’s death – and his life too. It’s one that will resonate widely. Similarly, with his mother in The Month of May where Michael ‘notes, as for the first time, the freckles on her neck and shoulder’. It captures her life and devotion to family.

His mother and her mother – Michael’s much-loved grandmother – came from North Leitrim originally, a place with a great sense of community and good will.

“Their neighbours had wished them well all their lives,” he observes. Michael’s poems capture that community spirit, rather than “the tooth-and-nail savagery of the Valley of the Squinting Windows”, he says, referring to the 1918 novel which offered a bleak, harsh perspective of rural Ireland.

And, while Michael’s early-life experience was specific to Sligo, ‘a town locked between two mountains and the sea’, he believes the same applied to much of rural Ireland.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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