Plenitude

Thomas McCarthy's new book Plenitude is a collection of formal, lyrical poems of family, politics and memory.

Following upon Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019), Plenitude marks a moment of completion and buoyant plenty in a very real and contemporary Irish world. Enriched at all times by a sense of history – the precise histories of heritage gardens, of novelists such as Molly Keane and Waterford neighbours who had gone to the Great War – his is a poetry of both brief formal lyric and longer historical meditation.

A working gardener since early childhood, his thoughts return constantly to images of seasonal change within humanised landscapes, to flowers, trees and changing seasons. The plenitude of the present moment in Ireland, its unexpected prosperity, is constantly prised open to reveal painful childhood memories and stressful political meditations. With McCarthy, the past, and the past remembered, is never far from the surface of the poems, and Plenitude contains many such illuminated moments, whether the poet is walking in the great Fota House gardens or pausing at a winter cafe in New York's Upper Westside.