Patrick Kehoe taught English classes in Barcelona for two years between 1978 and 1980. The poems gathered here re-assemble that vibrant metropolis as a parallel city of the imagination. There are visits to other Spanish cities, a memory of a brief walk through Murcia some forty years ago, and more recent poems deriving from stays in Madrid, La Coruña and Bilbao.
Kehoe’s short lyrics are redolent of hopeful motorways, of entries and exits, of crossings and re-crossings. They sing of the exhalations and exhaustions of the streets and of the vast cities of Spain. Ultimately, the Barcelona of the late seventies – an untramelled, bold- spirited place, that knew few tourists between October and May – continues to inform the work of the poet.
“And where to then, in the fired catapult,
Where the bed that nightfall
Under the drowse of stars?”