At the Races

Michael McCarthy grew up on a farm in West Cork, Ireland. His first poetry collection Birds’ Nests and Other Poems won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His children’s books have been translated into seventeen languages. He works as a priest in North Yorkshire.

'What I love about Michael’s poetry is the extraordinary specific detail, the pictures painted by the juxtaposition of words. It sings with a poetic intelligence. It moves the people, the memories, the vividness of detail.'
Sinead Cusack

‘There’s a country where you’ll have the wit to name a field the cabbage garden; there’s another where you’ll name the living water nothing more than Cold Hill Pond; and there’s this pair of old incorrigibles, lost, not lost, in conversation. There’s a life lived there and here and always among people, mostly poor, apostles. There’s a parishful of a circle of small shells / their ears to the ground. Any moment / now, the waters break. You wouldn’t want to miss it.’
Gillian Allnutt