Catherine Phil MacCarthy’s fourth collection explores the liminal – life on the ‘threshold’, moving from one moment to the next. These poems celebrate life with a sense of wonder, seeking meaning in mortality and loss. Reconciliation with a mother’s death brings ‘a sense of first breath on the earth’, where grief delivers a new freedom, ‘open to pure being’.
“A powerful... observer of love in all its forms.”
Thomas McCarthy, The Irish Times
“The poems seem artlessly simple, until the reader tries to grasp how they achieve their effects and begins to appreciate their challenging precision.”
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Catherine Phil MacCarthy was born in County Limerick in 1954, and educated at University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, and Central School of Speech and Drama, London. Her previous collections include This Hour of the Tide (1994), The Blue Globe (1998) and Suntrap (2007). Her poems appear in the anthologies To the Winds Our Sails (Salmon, 2010), Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, 1981-2007 (Salmon, 2006) and The Bee-Loud Glade (Dedalus, 2011). She lives in Dublin.