Devotion by Mícheál McCann
At the heart of Mícheál McCann’s eagerly awaited first collection is ‘Keen for A— ’, a reimagining of Eileen O’Connell’s heartrending Lament for Art O’Leary. In Devotion the poet transports the original tragedy in time and place. Echoing the 18th-century Irish, it lives now in contemporary Belfast where a young man’s male lover is murdered. The sequence charts from premonition, in filmic scenes, the first encounter, the news, denial, rage (and an oath of vengeance) to the funeral and A—’s family’s chilling silence afterward. Other poems range from memories of childhood and relationships with parents to the author’s own imaginary child. There is a wry poem on animal homosexuality, others on sea swimming and the satisfactions of a shared meal, while an elegiac poem recreates the final joy of an RUC Constable in a gay bar before he’s shot by a member of the INLA.
For all the solemnity of its subject matter love poems leaven its atmosphere as Mícheál McCann’s debut glows with the sense of someone who knows he has ‘discovered the name of his destination’.
How a rose opens more
and more as it dies, wanting
to share one more thing.
— ‘Song’
At the heart of Mícheál McCann’s eagerly awaited first collection is ‘Keen for A— ’, a reimagining of Eileen O’Connell’s heartrending Lament for Art O’Leary. In Devotion the poet transports the original tragedy in time and place. Echoing the 18th-century Irish, it lives now in contemporary Belfast where a young man’s male lover is murdered. The sequence charts from premonition, in filmic scenes, the first encounter, the news, denial, rage (and an oath of vengeance) to the funeral and A—’s family’s chilling silence afterward. Other poems range from memories of childhood and relationships with parents to the author’s own imaginary child. There is a wry poem on animal homosexuality, others on sea swimming and the satisfactions of a shared meal, while an elegiac poem recreates the final joy of an RUC Constable in a gay bar before he’s shot by a member of the INLA.
For all the solemnity of its subject matter love poems leaven its atmosphere as Mícheál McCann’s debut glows with the sense of someone who knows he has ‘discovered the name of his destination’.
How a rose opens more
and more as it dies, wanting
to share one more thing.
— ‘Song’
At the heart of Mícheál McCann’s eagerly awaited first collection is ‘Keen for A— ’, a reimagining of Eileen O’Connell’s heartrending Lament for Art O’Leary. In Devotion the poet transports the original tragedy in time and place. Echoing the 18th-century Irish, it lives now in contemporary Belfast where a young man’s male lover is murdered. The sequence charts from premonition, in filmic scenes, the first encounter, the news, denial, rage (and an oath of vengeance) to the funeral and A—’s family’s chilling silence afterward. Other poems range from memories of childhood and relationships with parents to the author’s own imaginary child. There is a wry poem on animal homosexuality, others on sea swimming and the satisfactions of a shared meal, while an elegiac poem recreates the final joy of an RUC Constable in a gay bar before he’s shot by a member of the INLA.
For all the solemnity of its subject matter love poems leaven its atmosphere as Mícheál McCann’s debut glows with the sense of someone who knows he has ‘discovered the name of his destination’.
How a rose opens more
and more as it dies, wanting
to share one more thing.
— ‘Song’
About the Author
Mícheál McCann is from Derry City. His poems have been published in The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review and Banshee, and anthologized in Queering the Green (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Romance Options (Dedalus Press, 2023). He holds a PhD from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s where he is the 2024 Publishing Fellow. Devotion is his first collection.
Praise for Devotion
Mícheál McCann’s debut collection, Devotion, is a stately book – courtly, even. At its centre is a sequence, ‘Keen for A -’, which takes as its basis the 18th-century poem Lament for Art O’Leary to construct an elegy for a dead lover that is at once stiff-backed but also deeply feelingful.
McCann’s language shows a rigorous control here, a somewhat timeless diction adding depth to the bereaved’s lament: “I knew then that I had discovered the name /of my destination, and would follow you there /along puddled roads and grassy paths /into the meadows in the south of the city”. It’s a wonderful act of reckoning up, of coming to terms with grief while exploiting the lyric poem’s potential for time travel, and resurrection, the possibility of blending tenses and summoning the dead allowing for a lurch of the heart and the false hope of return: “you will beat me home,/feet up, sun lightening your eyes.”
‘Although Lyons concentrates on her subjects, many of whom were from remote communities, like the best travel narratives there is an inner and outer journey as she reaches a crossroads in her own life.’
— Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
Publisher: The Gallery Press
Date Published: 17 May 2024
Paperback, 92 pages.
ISBN: 9781911338703
