Böcker av Maurice Whelan

In the preface, Maurice Whelan writes, 'It is one thing to get started as a writer. It is another to sustain a creative writing life. I select a few poets who have written about how they established, defined, and sustained themselves. There is an exploration of the relationship between dreams and poetry, of language and the benefits of knowing the way language has shaped who we are and how a love of words is essential if you are to become a poet.' There are many parts in this short book. In one, poems written during the Covid 19 outbreak offer a literary diary of life during the pandemic. As the world was turned upside down, Maurice Whelan responded to that upside down-ness by writing poetry. Poetry speaks to the author and the author speaks to us about the essence of what it is to be human. His belief in its revelatory and restorative powers inform every page. His is a poetry of life, a search for beauty, a declaration of rights, the right to an imaginative inner world, the right to an outer world founded on truth, liberty and justice.

'It struck me at some point when reading Maurice Whelan's Thought: The Invisible Essence that thinking, a bit like reading, writing and dreaming, is not framed often enough as conversation. As readers, when we're lucky, we enter into dialogue with the writer, and when fruitful, the conversation continues long after the book is finished. This poetic and meditative book offers an unhurried, deep analytic conversation with Maurice, as he wanders through the question of what it is to have a mind and to use it.' - Charlie Stansfield Maurice Whelan, psychoanalyst, poet, novelist, non-fiction writer, travels down many paths and asks the reader to travel with him. The places he offers are real and imagined: William Hazlitt's English countryside, John McGahern's Ireland's lanes and hedgerows; Shakespeare's island in The Tempest, Richard Dyer's poetic kingdom of the mind. And more. All places become spaces to the extent we are willing to explore them. Some journeys are not easy. Whelan uses his knowledge of Irish history, of the internal workings of the Catholic church and his lifetime experiences as a social worker and psychoanalyst, to interrogate the scandal of clerical child sexual abuse. He highlights an abject failure to think about the damage done to children, to their minds, hearts and souls. While content to wander, Whelan has the real business of living in his sights. He sees an appreciation of the essence of thought as necessary to maintain and improve the living of any life.

';If stillness can be tasted, precious memories will return, such as poetry once learned by heart, which in Maurice Whelan's case told of King Arthur receiving his sword Excalibur from the maiden in the lake. If silence can be heard, a poetry in life will breathe, as in this poet's observation about a dawn which ';holds / its perfection/as long/as you hold your breath'. As contrast to a hurried world, Maurice finds a treasury in stillness Gaelic melodies in the twilight of his mind, his wandering in the slipstream of a silent father's dreams, and from a wonderful ';Perfect Pitch' his reassuring knowing that ';the bow is on the string / fingers caress keys, eyes / are closing and heaven's gate / is opening once again'. This beautiful anthology combines nostalgia for times past, gratitude for nature's riches and a psychoanalyst's characteristically sharp insights into personal relationships: ';I wasn't staring / I saw my youth in you. / That's all.' His skill in crafting apparently effortless lines, seldom interrupted by commas, semicolons or full stops, conceals the challenge of holding a pen and facing a blank page. ';Sometimes / finding the right word / is like drilling through concrete / with a jackhammer.' There's a brave frankness in such an admission but the poetry which then emerges has been conceived from the peace in silence, the reflection and recall made possible by stillness. No wonder that, on a front page, before his own work begins, Maurice quotes Hazlitt: ';Poetryis not a branch of authorship: it is the stuff of which our life is made.'' Stuart Rees

The Lilac Bow is the first book of poetry by the author of the collections Excalibur's Return, A Season and a Time and, most recently, Spirit Eyes. Maurice Whelan is also the author of the acclaimed novel Boat People.

In ';Mount Cargill', a poem in Maurice Whelan's book Excalibur's Return, he described running up Mount Cargill in New Zealand with Richard O'Neill-Dean, to whom that volume was dedicated. Richard responded to Maurice's latest collection, Spirit Eyes, with a poem of his own, after discussing how Maurice sets about crafting a poem and the importance he attaches to a central thought or idea upon which the poem is constructed.Shipwrightfor Maurice Whelan, poetHe might look out the odd plank,let it season slowly,covered from the rain,so that frames, ribs, stringers,in the imagination, slowly form,the particular twist or warp or grainof a thoughtfavouring the idea of a hull,sensitive to wind and wave,to keep out storms,to manage strains.But, beyond all, the keelson,massive, strong,it must permit of no bend,take long keel-bolts,going down through heartwood,to fasten the lead weightof a real thought,many tons,to keep a good poem upright,and carrying on,tied in tight, to bindall between the sweet linesof its stem and stern,to make a fine entry,to set its wakeupon the oceansof the mind