One Another / Michael Coady

One Another is a welcome and worthy successor to Michael Coady’s much-loved All Souls. Poetry, prose and illustration are integrated in a cumulative work of gravity and compassion. The title poem is prelude to a set of variations on motifs of community, mortality and memory, emerging from an intimately known anchorage of place.

The writer’s voice is joined by a chorale of ‘overheard’ communal tones, in oral mode and various moods. The book’s inclusive reach finds room for play, as in ‘Textament’, or its guest versions of ‘The Gift of Tongues’.

A personal crisis deepens perspective and heralds renewal in ‘The Place of Hurt and Healing’. The human interplay of unsung lives and destinies suffuses One Another ’in the carnal war / with time that’s always lost / but never conceded’.