Kirjahaku

In this new collection of poetry, Terry McDonagh is back shaping his real and imagined journeys in rural Ireland, Germany, Australia and Britain. Always the artful storyteller, his language continues to bounce randomly and ordered like the memory of flat stones he used to cast out on the river. The streets and people revealed here are his true dislocated home, his lyrical moments lie about like spiritual observations.

This is a journey-in-verse from County Mayo to Hamburg, Germany, in the company of a border collie, Lady Cassie, with three sections devoted to Lady Cassie's point of view and three to the poet's. It is a venture of discovery transforming familiar motifs and ways of seeing the ordinary.

This collection includes four early plays from the Irish Celtic renaissance written by a County Galway playwright with three in Irish language and one in English. A valuable biographical essay accompanies the plays.

In a relentless rollercoaster of images McDonagh offers keenly observed commentary from his fourth floor flat, juxtaposing the urban contemporary landscape with the Mayo of his youth. No sacred cows are safe as the absurd and surreal are seamlessly blended allowing Hamburg, Germany and Kiltimagh, Co. Mayo to be effortlessly thrown into the same mix.

There’s no place like home, Terry McDonagh writes. And he concludes that home is enough. Home for McDonagh is Cill Aodain where he has returned after spending many years in Hamburg, also home for him. Hamburg, he writes, is all about discovery where he can own up to the injured wolf in himself, an Icarus hanging between fire and water in the raging racket of life. Cill Aodain calls him back—like the poet Raftery, he found a way out but never escaped as life circles him back to where he began. McDonagh can hold imagined fields, fences, happiness and tears together in poems of beauty, sorrow, love, pain and loss. Two Notes for Home is a major collection from one of Ireland’s finest contemporary poets.