Overview

Following upon Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019), Plenitude marks a moment of completion and buoyant plenty in a very real and contemporary Irish world. Enriched at all times by a sense of history – the precise histories of heritage gardens, of novelists such as Molly Keane and Waterford neighbours who had gone to the Great War – his is a poetry of both brief formal lyric and longer historical meditation. A working gardener since early childhood, his thoughts return constantly to images of seasonal change within humanised landscapes, to flowers, trees and changing seasons. The plenitude of the present moment in Ireland, its unexpected prosperity, is constantly prised open to reveal painful childhood memories and stressful political meditations. With McCarthy, the past, and the past remembered, is never far from the surface of the poems, and Plenitude contains many such illuminated moments, whether the poet is walking in the great Fota House gardens or pausing at a winter cafe in New York’s Upper Westside.

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9781800174108

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‘a poet of lovingly observed small details.’ — David Wheatley, TLS '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

Author Information

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 1924. He lives in Cork with his wife, the photographer and heritage gardener Catherine Coakley, and they have two adult children, Kate Inez and Neil.

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