"Terry McDonagh's poems begin in places we can all recognize, but take us into uncharted territories with tall tales that are funny, unsettling, and wise. There are hints of wistfulness in these poems, of getting older and looking back, but he is confident that we do the right thing in the end, and like Raftery's pebble that he loses in Melbourne, he may no longer hold it but is happy that he has passed it on. These are poems we can immerse ourselves in, and will emerge richer from the experience."—Andrew Forster, poet and Literature Officer at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere
"Exile and dislocation are familiar themes in Irish literature and Terry McDonagh explores these to the full. His poetic self continually reflects on journeying and he crafts images to make sense of it all. Memory, alienation and longing are leitmotifs within him."—Carol O'Connor, Tintean, Melbourne
Description
In this new collection, Terry McDonagh is back shaping his real and imaginative journeys round Cill Aodain, Hamburg, Melbourne or Slough. Always the artful storyteller, his language continues to bounce randomly and ordered like the memory of flat stones he used to cast out on the river. When a stone fell splash, it sent big or smaller ripples like voices across timeless water where you could never measure the distance between the concentric circles or the effect that one stone had on the life of water.
August 2013