Böcker av James J. McAuley

James J. McAuley (1936-2021) was born in Dublin, where he worked as an ESB clerk, then as a journalist. He was a freelance arts reviewer for Hibernia, The Kilkenny Magazine, The Belfast Newsletter and Radio Éireann. He lectured on art occasionally at the Hugh Lane Gallery, and in Adult Education at Queen's University Belfast. After emigrating to the United States in 1966, he received an MFA degree from the University of Arkansas in 1971, and from 1968 until his retirement in 1998 taught poetry and poetics, literature and Irish Studies courses at Lycoming College and Eastern Washington University, where he was also the founding Director of their Creative Writing Programs and Director of EWU Press. From 1979 until 1999, he directed the EWU Summer Writing Workshops at Newman House and the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin. He is represented in a number of anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Irish Verse and The Great Book of Ireland. New & Selected Poems is his tenth collection of poems.

At the center of this new collection--the work of over a decade since his previous book, Coming & Going, New & Selected--is the sequence, "God's Pattern," meditations on the Stations of the Cross, an old devotional form of pilgrimage or "pattern" still practiced in rural parishes of the poet's native country, Ireland. The meditations are interrupted by several "distractions," hence the book's title. Forming a more casual sequence of sorts, from a longish work in progress, are the poems from "Hospital," a mythic institution we all have to visit some time or other, where comedy and tragedy are also frequent visitors. Theme and treatment vary throughout the collection from somber reflection on the fate of a drunk in a cheap hotel room ("Cantata for the Feast of Saint Anonymous") to the scathing Celtic-style satire, "The Gingriad." McAuley is well regarded for his knowledge of experiments with traditional forms and rhythms; herein are blank-verse narratives and elegies, a Haiku sequence (the result of an argument about Haiku); a "Triptych" and other sonnets; a variation on the topographical poetry of the seventeenth century ("A Famine Field in Kildare"); even a carmen figurata ("Cross," "station" III of "God's Pattern"). The range of subjects is broad: "Brother Cornelius" recounts the life of a deaf-mute monk; "A Shift in the Wind" is about sailing; "Breathing" is, of course, about drowning. There are several poems of place, like "A Famine Field in Kildare," "Easter, Key Biscayne," "Holyhead," and "Samarkand" (which turns out to be a beach in Oregon). Childhood memoirs ("The Sorrowful Mysteries," "The Shirt") and painterly ("Self-Portrait, with Masks") or music-derived ("After a Chorus from Mefistofele") studies in verse continue persistent themes from McAuley's earliest work.