The Lost Province

Thomas McCarthy's new collection powerfully combines the private and the public in poems of memory, love, history and ideas. In the title sequence, written during 1993-4 when the prospect of ultimate peace in Northern Ireland was at its peak, he explores various kinds of betrayal in the light of the Dreyfus affair and its one honourable man, the deputy from the lost province of Alsace. The final sequence wryly reimagines history in the poems of St Declan, a proselytizing Christian Scientist who arrives in Dark Age Ireland on a floating boulder, armed with a shortwave radio. If memory is often the fulcrum around which these inventive poems turn, then the desire for `an autonomous region of the heart' is their driving force.