The book starts with his parents honeymooning in a wartime Wicklow orchard and ends, eight decades later, as the poet dances with his partner in a Wicklow field. In between we encounter Nuala O’Faolain on a bicycle on Brooklyn Bridge; Grace Gifford Plunkett, defiant in her lonely final years; Herbert Simms, Dublin’s brilliant, tragically overworked housing architect; and Patricia Lynch, writing The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey in one room while her husband wrote communist tracts in the next. Interlaced with such real lives are imagined ones – a hardened criminal detailing prison life in haikus, a doppelganger exploring alternative pasts for the author. Taken together, these poems chart a dazzling constellation of experiences.
