Thumbs Width

The title of "Thumb's Width", from the German "Daumenbreite" (roughly equivalent to an inch), indicates the book's preoccupation with the miniature. Sketching the childhood relationship between two brothers, the poems often settle on small objects - shrimps, cigarettes, "cat's eyes", plastic soldiers - to which childhoods may become attached. Beginning with the west coast of Ireland, particularly the tiny islands where human settlement has ceased, the book travels outward, geographically and thematically, through a wide variety of lyric, comic and dramatic forms. These patterns act to include the smaller, remembered patterns of an Irish childhood into the larger shapes of adulthood and the adult world.