Waterloo and Geneva, Dresden and Leningrad, The Milky Way and Rossnowlagh . . . Donegal man Frank McGuinness’s seventh collection, May Twenty-second, celebrates and mourns our times, alert to their secrets and their strangeness, their perils and passion, with unforgettable images. ‘The wind plays a mandolin of rainfall.’ (‘Gola’).
Dancing with Goya and Fred and Ginger, soaring with Little Richard and Robert Johnson, envisioning an elegy for Lyra McKee, these poems chronicle our history and demarcate our geography, revealing our empathy and enigmas. The book displays, in its wide-ranging embrace, the flair of a virtuoso.
They have me as they reared me,
the women with no shadows.
