Overview

In 2022, James McDermott lost his sixty-year-old father to COVID after three weeks in intensive care. In* Father Myself*, his second collection from Nine Arches Press, McDermott explores his father’s complex illness and death; grief; growth and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, he had to learn to father himself. In clear-sighted and often hard-hitting poems, McDermott takes the reader onto the frontline of the pandemic – documenting the experience and trauma of a COVID-bereaved family with an unflinching eye. Both powerful and compassionate, these extraordinary poems have the capacity to go beyond simply a record of events, reaching sensitively for the human details that matter – the beat of a heart and movement of breath, the touch of a hand, the words we use for goodbye.

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9781916760103

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Reviews

“Father Myself is a bright devastation of a book, a meditation on father-son love, queerness, loss, imperfection, and a man slowly becoming his own father. Lyrical, haunting and exquisitely rendered.” -- Joelle Taylor “This is emotional, gut-punching stuff. McDermott's best work to date.” -- Luke Wright “A brave and self-exposing collection of poems that’s a moving homage to a parent that died too soon, capturing the private vocabulary of a family as well as to the love and complexities of a father-son relationship. The book is an incredible testament to the pandemic, one where boy becomes man, and where loss brings catharsis and resurrection, but also enables a celebration and affirmation of the queer self. An intelligent, compelling and heartbreaking collection that’s an elegy to covid and to everything that through all the years could never be said” -- Paul Stephenson “James McDermott lays bare the language of grief in this deeply moving, startlingly authentic collection. Beautifully drawn vignettes of anguish and loss usher the reader from hospital to home, domesticity to deathbed. An examination of the human condition, settings and snippets of dialogue are precise, compelling, often forensic, with imagery of flesh and decay a recurring motif: ‘I see him / in rotten apples liver pâté red steak’. Yet tenderness surfaces again and again like a soft bruise: ‘Dad’s pierced left ear lobe / I touched for the first and last time in the chapel of rest’. Ultimately courage prevails, along with hope for a kind of rebirth: ‘who will I be brave enough to be now / I don’t need your approval’. A memorable read - powerful and affecting” -- Ian Humphreys

Author Information

James McDermott’s poetry collections include Wild Life (Nine Arches Press; shortlisted for an East Anglian Book Award 2023), ‘Erased’ (Polari Press) and Manatomy (Burning Eye; longlisted for Polari’s First Book Prize 2021). Plays published by Samuel French include ‘Jab’ (Finborough Theatre; nominated for an Off West End Theatre Award for Best New Play 2024), ‘Time and Tide’ (Park Theatre/Tour; nominated for an Off West End Theatre Award for Best New Play 2020) and ‘Rubber Ring’ (Pleasance Islington/Tour). James is one of the writers on ‘EastEnders’ and has written multiple episodes. He is an Arvon writing tutor and lectures in creative writing at The University Of East Anglia.

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