With unusual, memoir-like power, Crash Centre explores what happens when grooming, gaslighting and abuse masquerade as trust in the relationship between the author and a charismatic literary monk—an antagonist who unites the more toxic legacies of the Catholic Church and Northern-Irish Republicanism. Set at an elite boarding school in the early 1990s, this powerful, affecting work addresses questions of mentorship and betrayal, trauma, memory and erasure, as well as pathways to recovery. Employing impactful, direct address at key moments, the poems also use fairytale imagery and resonant poetic closure. Where Crash Centre begins as self-witness, to reclaim a younger self from silence, by the end it breaks through to a lost community, speaking to, and for, others.
In David McLoghlin’s work, Ireland encounters a new poetry: a male poet willing to write his body, willing to record what has been done to it. In Crash Centre, McLoghlin has braced himself for impact, for a deep dive into the very site of his abuse. The safety of metaphor is gone, replaced by the closeness of simile; there is no distance now—the reality of his bodily experience absolutely, microscopically captured. We feel a moral duty to re-trace this journey downwards alongside the poet, to see what he sees, has seen, can barely bring himself to see again. These are parts and places previously untravelled—terrain few male poets have dared to map. Hinted at in the work of some, perhaps, in John Montague’s “warm tracks” radiating across that “white expanse” of his lover’s body. But here is work that goes deeper, layers deep… shifting the power dynamics of sex in brave, compassionate and unflinching ways. David McLoghlin is a male poet brave enough to write the truth of his body and what has been done to it. He is aware of what this signifies—the dawn of a new tradition for male poets, a determined blooming out from what has come before, an expansion across new ground.
Jennifer Horgan
Author and Journalist
MORE Praise for David McLoghlin
In a number of breathlessly long sentences, this poem locates within the drama of Antarctic adventure an Irish singer-adventurer who sings the old way, that is, alone. The diction here is as rough as the unforgiving icy environment, and the physical exertion of singing plus the power of his song adds up to its own heroic achievement.
—Billy Collins
Judge’s citation on the poem “Tom Crean Sings Sean-Nós at the Tiller on the Southern Ocean” (included), prize-winning finalist in the 2015/2016 Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize
David McLoghlin’s debut collection, Waiting for Saint Brendan and Other Poems, proves strong on first reading and grows richer… with each subsequent rereading. … The poems are rhetorically baroque, inward-looking, and taut with imagery, and his complex metaphors unfold, slow and origami-like, often across multiple stanzas. …This is a necessary book, one well worth reading and returning to.
—Eric Bliman
Birmingham Poetry Review, Spring 2014, number 41
Santiago Sketches is a gift-box brimming with luminous local details of a loved place through which—over a space of nine months—the poet moves like a pilgrim of the senses, offering in poem after poem what’s been seen, felt, smelled, heard; what’s been touched, tasted, and understood: Flap of a pigeon’s wing . . . A dark-eyed girl in purple slippers . . . an angel raises a star/ among the horses . . . At the fountain, the junkies/ washing their needles. What McLoghlin has composed in this adventurous new collection is a scrupulously tolerant anatomy of Santiago, a religious, secular, open-eyed, warts-and-all love letter to a city where he—a stranger—managed for a little, unforgettable while to make himself at home.
—Eamon Grennan
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
Judges’ citation, The Patrick Kavanagh Awards, 2008
“As an avid reader of Irish literature, I found David McLoghlin’s work to be fresh and unexpected, yet still worthy of inclusion in the great canon of poetry that is produced by his nation”
—Mark Shaw
Natural Bridge journal
Talking About It
There was a world
tangled in my throat,
a tight singularity
that exploded
when words cut the container.
I said to a therapist
I think I was (—
abused.)
Walking yawed,
jellied.
Before, I had been
snow inside glass.
Particle collision.
The pinpoint
of truth from the tunnel
under the mountain
growing.
A great space is needed
when one starts to speak—
almost a whole other planet
for the pine forests around the castle
in the country where everyone
is sleeping.
*
Grotesque teenagers
paralysed in a growth spurt
came via the sly
interlocking thorns,
on through the courtyard
up into the room,
and kissed me.
When I woke, they were leaning over me,
mouth breathing. They said
You’re not dead.
Get up.
- - - - -
Hostage Walk
Before Lights Out, we’d be horsing around
when Fr. Narziss would come in,
“Hey!—Hey George! Stop that there now!”
There was no one by that name. Some scowled,
off to the side, at the antic ringmaster, or hurried
to finish pulling on their pajamas. But no one ever asked:
“What’s a monk doing on the Fifth Year Floor
among half-naked 17-year-old boys at nine o’clock at night?”
He always left 10 minutes before our House Master
Fr. Andrew came to say, “What are you doing still up,
Mr. Beatty? To bed with you, sir. To bed.”
Narziss drifted in several nights a week,
and in the gaggle that surrounded him
established enough credentials—“I was at Joan Baez…
Boston Common in ’68. Oh, of course…”
—to draw us across to the monastery in a smaller group
to talk in the large Reception Room with the picture window
one day in autumn when crows were aloft.
We was my friend Tim, and me. Tim’s hair
was almost white blond. Narziss loosened the collar,
boasting about opium and hashish, and perhaps
Herri Batasuna, or ETA, in Nationalist West Belfast.
“Oh, they were so handsome—long black hair—and so Basque.”
Then he slipped in: “Did I tell you I’m gay?”
No teacher had been this honest.
I’d been reading No One Here Gets Out Alive, Howl
from City Lights, Baudelaire.
Someone said to Dad, “you let him read Ginsberg?”
and Dad was almost proud.
Narziss recommended so much.
We went back to the school side around four in the afternoon,
silent, clambering the blast crater.
We hadn’t been in there that long. It’s long.
First Years dispersed ahead of us like minnows,
hugging the reef; Robo moping artfully.
Tim never went back, and would never say: “You’re excited
by Narziss, but—don’t go back, Glock.”
We know the hostage walk: monochrome streetscape,
some snow. Two figures walk towards opposing sides,
meet in the middle, and pass. On my way
to see Narziss three days later
I don’t notice: he’s booked the smaller room
this time, the one with no large window, only slit embrasures
in white walls. I see the enclosure, where monks
are passing—so contemplative, they are almost actors.
The day we walked back together, Tim made it
a normal day. People saw Tim, every day:
in the dorm, in the classroom.
No one asked: “where has David gone?”
- - - - -
Tom Crean Sings Sean-Nos at the Tiller in the Southern Ocean
And there were still 18 days until they would cross South Georgia
—something that was impossible: to cross crevasses
in perpetual snow with a biscuit each and ice for water
to make you thirst more, bare equipment, clothes
that were falling apart on the three of them—Worsley, Shackleton
and Crean—when increasingly they could have sworn
there was a fourth man with them in the dream stumble, days until
they walked into the whaling station at Stromness Bay, unrecognisable,
sooted from blubber smoke on Elephant Island, and five months
on the pack ice that travelled the Weddell Sea after Endurance
went down. Two boys ran from them in terror, shouting
"Strange men are coming!" because they were coming
from the interior, a direction from which no one comes.
But there were still 18 days in the ice flood—jerry-rigged, timbers
and nails salvaged out of the lifeboats, navigating 800 nautical miles
All of the above poems are Copyright © David McLoghlin, 2024
