Poet, Critic & Journalist

Doran’s barber shop, can you believe, is still there on Castlewood Avenue, while back from oblivion is the Stella, or at least a hipster’s retro take on it, but further down the road that old fleapit, the Prinner (the Princess if you don’t mind), is as long gone as the Lone Ranger and Tonto serials […]

St Joseph’s church, Glasthule, 2019 (for Ailbhe) The first time in this church was on our way to the playground and we lit two candles, so now you ask if we can do it again. A Mass is on and though I’m not a believer and at three you don’t yet know who you are, […]

Cafe Grey, Greystones, 2019 Why are you always disappearing, John? That’s what you said, Sylvia, and it was true: though merely for a furtive smoke, yet gone from your presence, and quite out of the blue. I don’t like it, you rebuked me, as if somehow you knew that people really can disappear, not just […]

I have no idea what we talked about that midsummer bank holiday evening at the corner of the Leinster Road, two students circling each other by the side wall of Rathmines library and jabbering on as if our lives depended on it. We didn’t know each other then, and a lifetime later, as I watch […]

(for Helen and Warren, February 2013) A woodland nymph, or so the name suggests: a sprite, perhaps, best fit for river banks or bird-filled glades, now an inquiring guest in our more puzzling world. Let’s just give thanks for those blue eyes, that eagerness to greet our fear and wonder with an impish smile, as […]

Rockfield Drive, Terenure, 1960 Disrupted while playing a Haydn quartet by the yowled complaint of his youngest son, your father came to where all of us were at play and, without any ado, slapped you across the face. I can hear it still, that whack, and can still see the fiddle tucked under his left […]

Royal Hospital, Donnybrook, May 2023 (for Lisa Cogan) Whatever you do, don’t fall, the medics had advised, yet whatever I did I kept falling, if not in the street, or trying to board the Dart, then (for heaven’s sake!) tripping over myself in the safety of my bedroom. In the past, of course, I have […]