Here and There - Mulcahy, Brendan

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Résumé :
The title Here and There was chosen to signal a poetry collection that places the emphasis on the movement and change which are inescapable features of human existence. The concepts here and there are bonded by experience, can be oppositional and can suggest in a conversational way the sense of being all over the place. In preparing the collection for publication, the author remembered Seamus Heaney's marvellous poem Postscript, which contains the lines, You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass. The wisdom of Heaney's assertion - that the attempt to inhabit an unassailable Here is unrealistic - is deeply appealing and links to the need for a stabilising version of what Keats called 'negative capability' in navigating life's conflicting currents. So, there are poems of migration and adaptation...

Biographie:
Born in Cork city, in the Republic of Ireland, in 1951, Brendan found himself caught up in the pattern of migration which saw a quarter of a million Irish people migrate during the 1950s. Translated to the north London suburb of Harrow, he attended the local Catholic grammar school before studying for a BA Hons in English and American Literature at Manchester University, subsequently qualifying as a teacher. For forty years Brendan taught English in secondary schools in Cheshire and Northants, Devon and London, holding senior management posts in four of those schools. He published articles in The Guardian and the Times Education Supplement on literary and pedagogical subjects and took an MA in Education at Leicester University. Brendan has always placed poetry at the heart of the English curriculum, with Shakespeare as presiding spirit. T.S. Eliot has also had iconic status, while Robert Frost's dictum, The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader, has always rung true for him and been confirmed by experience. In retirement, Brendan has fulfilled his ambition to write and publish poetry. A keen tennis player and guitarist / song-writer, he lives with his wife in the south London suburb of Wimbledon, within a stone's throw of the All England Club championship grounds....

Sommaire:
poems of travel and reaction to other ways of doing things...