John McAuliffe - OF ALL PLACES THE GALLERY PRESS
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POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

An Irish Times Book of the Year, 2011

With a hint of Auden’s formal patterns, John McAuliffe’s direct, intriguing poems are simultaneously grounded in the twenty-first century and alive to images and voices from the ancient and recent past. From the implicit surprise or exclamation of its title to the literal reach of all locations, Of All Places embraces Roger Casement, Batman, the last Yahi Indian, the cultures of Stonehenge and Tara, and a former taoiseach in the company of someone ‘who might be his daughter’.

It re-enters Yeats’s west of Ireland and visits America’s West Coast. An ‘archive’ broadcast jolts a time lag into focus and conjures connections between historic taproots and contemporary concerns. John McAuliffe’s truncated narratives, their ‘exemplary control . . . relish for language . . . and his poems’ capacity to retain a sense of their own spontaneity’ (Tim Liardet, Poetry Review) promise their readers:

                         ‘The known world and the unseen, 
                         to which you’ll come back:
                         that is, the point of departure, the destination,
                         and all points in between.’ 
                                         — from ‘Old Style'

Date of Publication : 1st July 2011


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Review

THE POEMS IN John McAuliffe’s Of All Places (The Gallery Press, 72pp, €11.95) are also said to contain “a hint of Auden’s formal patterns” in a back-cover note. It is undoubtedly McAuliffe’s strongest collection to date, and the poems in it reveal the poet’s sincere concern with communicating something useful out of his everyday encounters with the world. Poems such as House Fire, Bringing the Baby to Rossaveal, Week 2 and The Hallway Mirror give generous insights into domesticity and family life, but Of All Places also contains strong new poems by McAuliffe on broader social and historical themes. Among the most significant of these are Crash, which deals with the downfall of Roger Casement, and Transfers, a poem based partly on “the sale of works of art from the Bank of Ireland collection” in 2010.

McAuliffe sometimes allows his poems to become “too neat and a little too close to whatever we call home”, as he puts it himself in Marriage, the Realist Tradition . At times he seems to throw in the towel just when things are getting interesting or tough. And yet the acknowledgment that the poet or poetry cannot provide all the answers is important in itself if what McAuliffe calls “the free drift to nowhere in particular” in the book’s opening poem (Old Style) is to be attempted. As the speaker of that striking lyric puts it:

Not just the lay-by, or the motorway
        or its central reservation.
Not just the ring road, or the cul-de-sac
        with its pretty forsythia border.
Not just the house, or its extension,
        and its hundred windows shining away.
Instead the known world and the unseen,
        to which you’ll come back:

Despite moments of curious self-doubt – in The Whole Show, for example, or in A Midgie, the volume’s disappointingly slight closing poem – the journeys McAuliffe made “to the known world and the unseen” in the making of this book have been worth the effort. Of All Places is a compelling third collection.
                                                                                                                                                                      — Philip Coleman, The Irish Times, November 2011

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 A BETTER LIFE. Cover painting ‘Roots’ by Martin Gale  NEXT DOOR Cover: ‘Still Life: Table Top’ by Tony O’Malley courtesy of Jane O’Malley and Taylor Galleries