Böcker av Michael Magee

While growing up in West Belfast, Sean does every­thing he's supposed to do. He works hard, he studies, and he - mostly - stays out of trouble. The thirty-year conflict is over, he's told, and his future is lit with promise. But when Sean returns home from university, he finds much of the same-the same friends doing the same gear in the same clubs; the same lost broth­ers and mad fathers; the same closed doors; the same silences. There are no jobs, Sean's degree isn't worth the paper it's written on, and no one will give him the time of day. One night, he assaults a stranger at a party, and everything begins to come undone. Close to Home begins with this sudden act of violence and expands into a startling portrait of working-class Ireland under the long shadow of the Troubles. It's a first novel drawn from life, written with the immediacy of thought. It's about what happens when men get desperate, about the cycles of loss and trauma and secrecy that keep them trapped, and about the struggle to get free.

The mood and scope of the whole are sounded in Part I, The New Odysseus, a series of twenty linked poems, where a somewhat weary new Odysseus invokes his legendary adventures and various gods as he wanders both in the Tacoma present and yet in other lands and times, with an eye on our absurd world of the coffee house, sex change, the mall, pogo sticks, an anomalous game of cricket, poverty, yearning, old age, mortality, a quiet, bleak fading. It is a phantasmagorical trip, told with a kind of rueful even solemn whimsy which is his own. The following two sections reflect Magee's personal odyssey. They give us back the varied worlds he has inhabited, their landscapes and meanings, through the vision of artists and poets whose personae Magee explores and at times adopts. It is a strange world, steeped in art, populated by the active ghosts of Proust, Whitman, Roethke, Chagall, O'Keeffe, Yeats, Cather and others, as well as by spirits like Rapunzel. But then a homeless man speaks as he wakes in his cold blankets near Seattle docks. Or we pause in front of a Dali painting to consider time itself. It is quite a trip.The book is dedicated to Jean Musser, the poet's late wife and fellow poet. She also appears movingly in a few of the poems. Her presence is felt throughout. -Ben Drake