Thomas McCarthy is an Irish poet, novelist, and critic, born in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, Ireland. He attended University College Cork where he was part of a resurgence of literary activity under the inspiration of John Montague. Among his contemporaries, described by Thomas Dillon Redshaw as "that remarkable generation," there were Theo Dorgan poet and memoirist, Sean Dunne, poet, Greg Delanty, poet, Maurice Riordan poet and William Wall, novelist and poet. McCarthy edited, at various times, The Cork Review and Poetry Ireland Review. He has published seven collections of poetry with Anvil Press Poetry, London, including The Sorrow Garden, The Lost Province, Mr Dineen's Careful Parade, The Last Geraldine Officer and Merchant Prince, described as "an ambitious and substantive book". The main themes of his poetry are Southern Irish politics, love and memory. He is also the author of two novels; Without Power and Asya and Christine. He is married with two children and lives in Cork City where he works in the City Libraries. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1977. His monograph "Rising from the Ashes" tells the story of the burning of the Carnegie Free Library in Cork City by the Black and Tans in 1920 and the subsequent efforts to rebuild the collection with the help of donors from all over the world. In his work "the ludicrous and the homely go hand-in-hand but the relaxed, conversational style can switch from emphatic narration to literary observation, as when the poet quotes Henry James’s remark, ‘As the picture is reality so the novel is history/And not as the poem is: a metaphor and closed thing."
Works
Poetry
1978 in poetry: The First Convention, Dolmen Press, Dublin
1981 in poetry: The Sorrow Garden, Anvil Press, London
1984 in poetry: The Non-Aligned Storyteller, Anvil Press, London
1989 in poetry: Seven Winters in Paris, Anvil Press, London
1996 in poetry: The Lost Province, Anvil Press, London
You can hear an interview with Thomas McCarthy and listen to him reading from his work all recorded in March 2010 at http://www.podcasts.ie/featured-writers/featured-poets/thomas-mccarthy/ Thomas is also a contributor to their series of special podcasts "A Writers's Passage" in which 10 Irish authors take a personal tour through the locations of their books. The podcast based on The Gardens of Remembrance is just one of over 200 audio podcasts available free on this site.
