Pandemonium

During the dark, disturbed years after Ireland’s economic collapse and humiliation in 2008, poet Thomas McCarthy retreated back into an intensely personal world where what was political took on an almost macabre, geological character. He returned as often as possible to the coast of County Kerry, laden with books and bundles of newspapers. The agitation of the Irish coastline, the winds off Mount Brandon beating upon the frail canvas of a tent he sometimes used, seemed a perfect metaphor for the financial and moral cataclysm, the pandemonium, now fallen upon a society that had so recently escaped from the tensions of the Ulster conflict. Here in poem after poem we find ’the tide’s scandalous incompetence.’

Thomas McCarthy was born in Co. Waterford in 1954. He was educated at University College Cork and worked for many years at Cork City Libraries. He now writes fulltime. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most notably The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Lost Province (1996) and Merchant Prince (2005), as well as two novels and a collection of essays and diaries.