Here and Gone

By: John Menaghan

€12.00

Here and Gone, a book-length sequence of poems, chronicles the poet’s loss of both parents, two years apart, back at the turn of the century. Part I moves from his mother’s sudden decline to his father’s unexpected death and its aftermath. Part II traces his mother’s descent into deeper infirmity and the end of her own life. Stark, restrained, evocative, poignant, these poems both embody and enact a complex, nuanced,...

ISBN	978-1-908836-69-4
Pub Date	Thursday, February 27, 2014
Cover Image	The author's parents photographed by the author himself
Page Count	74
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Here and Gone, a book-length sequence of poems, chronicles the poet’s loss of both parents, two years apart, back at the turn of the century. Part I moves from his mother’s sudden decline to his father’s unexpected death and its aftermath. Part II traces his mother’s descent into deeper infirmity and the end of her own life. Stark, restrained, evocative, poignant, these poems both embody and enact a complex, nuanced, deeply felt exploration of loss, grief, and our shared mortality.

“What does it mean to live, to have lived?” John Menaghan asks in the wake of his parents’ deaths. In Here and Gone, he strips away nearly every traditional poetic defense in a stoical quest to confront our common catastrophe and ponder the meanings it stubbornly refuses to yield. Through Menaghan’s narrative mastery, these startlingly, almost shockingly direct poems enlist our courage to gaze with him on the thing itself, urging us to “feel again a new kind of infancy, / of having just been born into a new / and frightening world.”

Jay Rogoff

author of Venera and The Art of Gravity

In Here and Gone, John Menaghan's fourth collection, the thematic lens is focused on the lives and declines of his parents. Tenderly, in clear and elegant lyric poems, Menaghan brings to life both a time and place, as well as providing us with a remarkable elegy for a vanished Irish-American urban world. Here and Gone is a triumph.

Eamonn Wall

author of A Tour of Your Country and Sailing Lake Mareotis

John Menaghan

A prize-winning poet and playwright, JOHN MENAGHAN has published four books with Salmon Poetry: All the Money in the World (1999), She Alone (2006), What Vanishes (2009), and Here and Gone (2014). His fifth book, composed entirely of jazz-related poems, is forthcoming from Salmon. Menaghan's poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Ambit, The Hopkins Review, Brilliant Corners, Poetry Ireland, The Cuirt Journal, Atlanta Review, nth position, Berkeley Poetry Review, Revival, California Quarterly, The Adirondack Review, and American Arts Quarterly. And he has been nominated in four different years for a Pushcart Prize. He has given readings around Ireland and the U.K, in France and Hungary, and across the U.S. from New York to Honolulu. His short plays have received a total of 6 productions, and one --“A Rumor of Rain”--was published in The Hollow & Other Plays (2008).