Pandemonium

Thomas McCarthy

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784102968
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784102975
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Europäische Poesie

Written in the wake of Ireland's 2008 economic collapse, Thomas McCarthy's Pandemonium moves between lament and protest in search of a meaningful response in language. Many of the poems were written during a period of retreat along Ireland's south-west coast, a landscape that imbues McCarthy's politics with geological intensity. The Atlantic horizon 'where the sun lies down in the west to die' is mirrored inland by corruption and rot, a modern Ireland beset, in the poet's eyes, by financial and moral pandemonium. McCarthy's subtle satiric wit and understated lyricism preserve raw outrage as historical document. His poems register the moral ire of many during a pivotal era of Irish history, leading with the poet's only weapon, the word – 'the ink trail that pain makes on the page'.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Between Trains
• The Land Is Not Settled
• The Hope of Finding Something
• Winter with Catherine
• While You Sleep
• Become Water
• At Ink Level, the Sea
• The Birds’ Cry
• Chess, Perfume, the Sea
• SOCIAL CLASS IN WEST WATERFORD
• Largesse
• Agapanthus
• In a Fruit Cage
• Vertigo
• Jerusalem
• The Late Hour in L. A.
• Frantic Venice
• The Hour Extends Itself
• Shaken to Pieces
• Coastal Express
• Going Back
• The Late Wind
• A Gloomy Wakefulness
• They Have Left
• A Gannet Falls
• Rock of Ages
• The Sea Is on Fire
• Summer Night
• The Sky Is Iodine
• A Storm among Books
• Morning Rain
• Camping near Dingle
• The Year Turns
• Petrichor
• While It Lasted
• Nuptials
• Foraging Honeybees
• Grunewald
• A Pariah Kite
• Under a Street Lamp with Zhao Lihong
• Night Sky on the Pudong Ferry, 2004
• Starlings over Termini Station
• At Newcastle Central
• Slow Food
• Elegy for a Munster Poet
• Three Books on the Ballyferriter Sand
• Father Prout
• Halloween at Macalester College
• At Glenshelane House, 1979
• An Airport for Egrets
• Ruins
• A Unionist Intellectual of the Twenties
• Jeremiah
• Bel Canto
• Lisbon Treaty Referendum, 2008
• Digging in December
• A Sound in the Woods
• A Pagan Childhood, 1964
• On Reading Heaney’s ‘Oysters’
• Heavy Rain
• The Unexpected
• The Last Architect in the Irish Public Service
• Acknowledgements
• Also by Thomas McCarthy
• Copyright