Description
Book SynopsisWritten in the wake of Ireland's 2008 economic collapse, Thomas McCarthy's Pandemonium moves between lament and protest in search of a meaningful response in language. Many of the poems were written during a period of retreat along Ireland's south-west coast, a landscape that imbues McCarthy's politics with geological intensity. The Atlantic horizon 'where the sun lies down in the west to die' is mirrored inland by corruption and rot, a modern Ireland beset, in the poet's eyes, by financial and moral pandemonium. McCarthy's subtle satiric wit and understated lyricism preserve raw outrage as historical document. His poems register the moral ire of many during a pivotal era of Irish history, leading with the poet's only weapon, the word - 'the ink trail that pain makes on the page'.
Trade Review'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; 'Pandemonium's urgent, involving and rewarding poems make us question where we have come from and look again at where we are going.' The Irish Times; 'His voice - with its idiosyncratic tone and verbal texture - registered firmly as one of the most distinctive and it is now one of the most authoritative among poets of his generation. The weight of that authority and his mastery of a personal tone are evident in this fine new collection.' Dublin Review of Books
