Hoops of Holiness

By: Maurice Harmon

€12.00

Maurice Harmon’s sixth collection moves from the sunlit terraces of faith to the dismemberment of a rural estate and that mingling of the metaphorical and the realistic characterises much of the poetry. The decline of Catholic power and the losses that went with it is a kind of underlying event that drives much of the poetry from the compelling dramatisation in ‘Hoops of Holiness’ to the human narrative of ‘Tales Out o...

ISBN	978-1-910669-49-5
Pub Date	Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Page Count	102
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Maurice Harmon’s sixth collection moves from the sunlit terraces of faith to the dismemberment of a rural estate and that mingling of the metaphorical and the realistic characterises much of the poetry. The decline of Catholic power and the losses that went with it is a kind of underlying event that drives much of the poetry from the compelling dramatisation in ‘Hoops of Holiness’ to the human narrative of ‘Tales Out of School’, the libretto at the end of the book. It permeates the portrait of the priest who is having a passionate affair, a boy’s desperate flight from boarding school, and a woman’s determined efforts to keep a marriage going. Harmon responds with compassion and understanding to abusive priests, to the homeless and the hapless, and to disturbing events in his own life. He writes in a variety of forms, elegies, narratives, nature poems, villanelles, satires. His humane perspective enables him to write sensitively about individuals and to consider how we fail to understand and to interpret historical events, such as the sieges of Drogheda and Limerick. Hoops of Holiness is the product of a mature and intelligent imagination.

Maurice Harmon

Maurice Harmon, a distinguished academic, literary critic and scholar, has published studies of Irish writers from William Carleton to Seán O'Faoláin, Mary Lavin, and Benedict Kiely, from Austin Clarke to Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and Dennis O’Driscoll. Harmon’s career as editor-founder of the Irish University Review and his publications, including Sean O’Faolain: A Life, 1994; the ground-breaking anthology, Irish Poetry after Yeats, 1979; Selected Essays, 2006; Thomas Kinsella: Designing for the Exact Needs, 2008; with The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland, his translation of Accalam na Senórach, the medieval compendium of stories and poems, 2009, among others, affirm him as one of the elect. His reputation as a poet has grown with the publication of the stylish and humane Loose Connections (Salmon, 2012) and the compassionate Hoops of Holiness (Salmon, 2016). afterwords (Salmon, 2020) is his seventh collection.