Loose Connections / Maurice Harmon

Building on the acclaim of When Love is Not Enough: New & Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2010), Maurice Harmon writes with confidence and strength in this new collection. Loose Connections shows us a man who has come through vicissitudes and now re-examines issues that have been satisfying or disturbing in the past. The strength that comes from endurance is heard in a voice that is detached but focused on particular experience: departure to boarding school, separation within families, an extra-marital affair, sexual pleasure, sexual abuse, misunderstanding between fathers and sons. A young woman walks with her child on a beach in Achill, unaware of ubiquitous evil that rises from the waves to destroy innocence and that may be encountered in the home, the church, the doctor’s surgery. This, as one of the villanelles says, is the way we are. The idea of breakdown, of loosening connections runs like a tide through the collection. It is offset by positive values. The woman who shows her thighs in a Dublin café is celebrated in a well-known song, a ditch in Achill proliferates with flowers, horses embody qualities of endurance and grace, new lenses reveal the renewed beauty of the world, and a snow-capped mountain rises like a monstrance. Throughout the collection a style, lively, nuanced, and humane, records the drama of existence.