Catherine Phil MacCarthy: Poet and Writer

Suntrap - Review

The Irish Times

April 28, 2007, CITY EDITION

By: Thomas McCarthy

CATHERINE PHIL MACCARTHY has developed a confident and enduring personality in poems. Her Suntrap sparkles with life and light - and, for her, light is both a method and a metaphor. The title poem contains a timely warning about the dangers of too much light:

Now he dips
the silvery rim as if he’s fishing air
to trap the sun on newspaper, angling it

closer so it smoulders and takes fire,
and I learn for the first time how to burn.

The poem says everything: how the physical world retains its own narrative, even while critical or intellectual worlds suffer trauma and storms, and how the soul yearns for light, not just of experience, but of understanding: “treading hard against/the weight of dark/to a trap of light/was your instinct to survive.”
MacCarthy has also created a great travelogue of contemporary Irish life. Her poems move from the west coast of Ireland, with its own kind of light, to that truly sunlit porch, the suntrap of Spain or Africa. This is the poetry of experience, not escape:

cocooned by squabbles
of Breton children, a pair of fireflies
dancing in the glow of kerosene
- Camping in Mesquier

But it is as love poet that Catherine Phil MacCarthy triumphs. From This House of the Tide, published 13 years ago, to the present collection, she has been a powerful, chthonic observer of love in all its forms. Suntrap continues this vein in its chronicling of the robust power of attachments, from the primal power of”Dance” to the sexual intrigue of “Another Woman.” Here is a poet, then, who becomes stronger with each new collection, a poet who understands that furnace of love while longing for late winter ice to hold firm along the Shannon.

Thomas McCarthy’s most recent collection of poems, Merchant Prince, is published by Anvil Poetry

<< biography

<< books