Praise and Poems

This collection is a remarkable achievement. Both passionate and clear-eyed, Patricia McCarthy’s poems transform the personal moment into something universal and enduring. Her honesty and generous sensibility invite us to find ourselves in these poems. Every line is imbued with a sureness of touch that comes from a deep moral and emotional intelligence finding its voice in graceful lyricism. ~ Paul O’Prey

Patricia McCarthy’s poems have always inspired me. ~ Grey Gowrie

There, still
to Annie

Along the rush-lined boreens of Brackloon
I see you still, your long evening shadow
strung between glades pulled around you
like shawls after a bald mountain spell.
As if you have forgotten, simply, to phone –

and are there, about to pick up the receiver,
raging with me for not keeping in touch.
I hear you confess how scared you felt
at the ticks from the bracken, stuck
to your skin, sucking the blood’s weather

from your body over penitential stones
in the descent on Croagh Patrick’s steep side.
When kittiwakes cried out for you, my hand,
I said, would hold yours, pull you back
from the cliffs of your high cheekbones

that in the past you had fallen over, spattered
with Atlantic salt. I can’t wait for your voice
to come through again, crackling along a line
wild with fuschia whose red bells you ring
at close-calling times. How I chatted

about my visit, perched on a breath – soon,
yes soon, promising to swing with you in trees,
on tides, in hammocks of green light.
The silence between us, softly familiar, creeps
along the rush-lined boreens of Brackloon.