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’.

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