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In Frank McGuinness’s sixth collection, The Wedding Breakfast, imagination and recollection combine to register historical and political moments (‘Burnfoot’, ‘The Battle of Clontibret’, and ‘The Protestant Boys’), a son haunted by his father and the author’s marriage in the Cardiac Unit of a Belfast hospital. Poems prompted by Bruegel the Elder and Géricault join versions of Lorca and Villon. Infused with an Oriental sensibility the book embraces far-flung places — Machu Picchu, the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the bus to Fatima.
The Wedding Breakfast, Frank McGuinness’s finest collection, concludes with a stunning elegy (‘Who Could Survive the Atlantic Ocean?’) for Danny Sheehy.
‘[Frank McGuinness] is an important ‘Northern’ writer, although his reach extends much wider than that contentious province. As a dramatist, he’s up there with Friel. As a poet, he fits with Montague and Hewitt, with perhaps a spicing of Longley. He can be lyrical and strident. He is steeped in his home place, its lore and memory. This collection tosses a wide net over his preoccupations, glimpses of a life infused, like a good gin.’ — Books Ireland
‘Frank McGuinness’s The Wedding Breakfast (Gallery €11.95) is deeply reflective. His arresting opening sonnet begins, “That could be me, the red hair man/leading his child, his red-haired child/down the aisle of the moving train/ travelling to Belfast…” The child and the man share “secrets” and “stories” which are “passed from finger to thumb,/ stories that begin, that end on a train/moving to Belfast, travelling from Dublin/where somebody says to himself,/that could be me, the red hair man/ leading his child, his red-haired child . . . With its tail in its mouth, its endless mirroring, its small yet distinct drama, it’s an addictive poem, setting the stage for a collection of poems as dramatic and harrowing as the Greek drama which inspires this major playwright.’ — Martina Evans, The Ticket
