Pandemonium

Written in the wake of Irelands 2008 economic collapse, Thomas McCarthys 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 Irelands south-west coast, a landscape that imbues McCarthys 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 poets eyes, by financial and moral pandemonium. McCarthys subtle satiric wit and understated lyricism preserve raw outrage as historical document.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 poets only weapon, the word the ink trail that pain makes on the page

About the Author :
Thomas McCarthy was born in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, in 1954 where he was educated at the local Convent of Mercy and subsequently at University College Cork. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries before retiring to write full-time in 2014. He was a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa in 1978–79 and International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994–95. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Assembly of artists and writers. He has won several awards for his poetry, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the O’Shaughnessy Prize and the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. His first collection, The First Convention, was published by The Dolmen Press, Dublin, in 1978 and his most recent collections, Pandemonium (2016), and Prophecy (2019), were published by Carcanet Press. A former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review, his journals, Memory, Poetry and the Party, were published by The Gallery Press in 2022 and his essays, Questioning Ireland, appeared in 2024. He lives in Cork with his wife, the photographer and heritage gardener Catherine Coakley, and they have two adult children, Kate Inez and Neil.

Review :

'No other poet comes to mind, living or dead, who has succeeded in engaging the political as poetic subject matter . . . McCarthy, it would seem, has been able to internalize the subject matter and given it the time to cool down and clarify, until his art can give it a shape.'
August Kleinzahler

'Pandemonium's urgent, involving and rewarding poems make us question where we have come from and look again at where we are going.'
The Irish Times

'His voice - with its idiosyncratic tone and verbal texture - “ registered firmly as one of the most distinctive and it is now one of the most authoritative among poets of his generation. The weight of that authority and his mastery of a personal tone are evident in this fine new collection.'
Dublin Review of Books

'Thomas McCarthy's Pandemonium was launched in late 2016, but its quality justifies its inclusion here. A long time in gestation, it was well worth the wait, with its themes of home, heart, and recession.'
Cork Evening Echo Best Books of 2017

'Pandemonium is a superb collection, written by a fearless poet at the height of his powers. If anger is infectious then this critic is angry too for McCarthy deserves more attention: he deserves acclaim, honour and recognition for the lonely furrow he continues to plough.'
Cloona N Roordiin, Southword