LIMERICK - The Launch of DAVID McLOGHLIN'S debut collection of poetry

Native to Ireland but relocated in childhood to Brussels and New England, David McLoghlin writes about emigration and a search for belonging, about betrayal and abuse, about the imagined private lives of the saints, and the geometries of loss and love on the New York subway. In so doing, he offers the reader a first collection - Waiting for Saint Brendan and other poems - that is at once expansive and refined: an uncommon blend of scope and pointillist detail.

“These are big, ambitious, sometimes sprawling poems, rich in narrative and in detail, an autobiography of sorts, where the voyaging soul is concerned to find home and meaning in a dialogue between self and other. Like Saint Brendan, the author seems to understand that if home is where you set out from, home is also where you hope to find journey’s end. Yet, if the title poem draws on the mythological, these poems are surely rooted in our century of migration and displacement, where identities are negotiated as much as given. It is the candid engagement with the difficult choices and trade-offs made in a search for some omphalos, some centre, in an ever more shifting world, which energises this collection.” Moya Cannon and Theo Dorgan, The Patrick Kavanagh Awards, November 2008