Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
Summary
Published in 1997, All Souls, Michael Coady's third collection of poetry, was one of that year's best received volumes of new work. It is a rich, varied, eclectic, and inspired compendium that incorporates poetry, story, illustration and memoir to reflect the interlocking and overlapping territories of peoples and places and time and memory across Ireland and America. The work is ambitious in scope, theme, and design, embracing poetic and colloquial voices, the Irish and English languages, the often painful experiences of the Irish diaspora, and the residual experiences of loss felt by those who remained in Ireland. All Souls is also an exploration of the poet's family history, which thematically and emotionally frames the work, and it is shaped, though hardly bordered, by Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, where Coady has lived his own life as writer and teacher, and by the experiences of the emigrant Coadys in the United States. All Souls is a literary work of the highest order, an individual act of recovery of family history and, on a larger level, a representation of the pained mechanics of exile. In modern Irish poetry, the works it most closely resembles are John Montague's The Dead Kingdom and Ciaran Carson's Belfast Confetti, both formally ambitious poetic expressions of history and place though All Souls, in its odyssey of styles, can perhaps be best compared to James Joyce's Ulysses. However, of the Irish poets of his own generation, Coady is thematically closest to Eavan Boland, a writer who, in both her poetry and prose, has made the diaspora a central platform of her work.
Writing of All Souls, Ciaran Carson notes that it “is a compendium of the implications of that family history, written like a symphony.…Few books like All Souls are being written these days, but I would like to think that such a book could only have come out of Ireland: it unites the demotic and the sophisticated; it speaks through the mouths of people, and encompasses all kinds of art. Society and destiny shape us, but we shape them” (30–31). Theo Dorgan writes that “in his new collection Michael Coady stands quietly but firmly before us as a man gifted with true humility, committed to the stringent duties of memory, memorialist to a place and to a people.
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- Information
- Writing Modern Ireland , pp. 116 - 127Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015