All Souls (Gallery Books)

Michael Coady's rich compendium incorporates poetry, story, illustration and memoir to reflect the interlocking and overlapping territories of people and place, time and memory. This moving work involves colloquial voices and utterance from the Irish tradition and affirms an inheritance which includes emigration and pilgrimage to the United States. All Souls centres on the long title poem, an afterhours stumble homewards encountering the living and the dead, and 'The Use of Memory', a heartbreaking restoration of the lives of two mothers lost in childbirth and a father and son adrift on the tides of dislocation, poverty and pain. Chronicler and celebrant, Michael Coady has shaped a book of unusual integrity, inviting us to enter its world and concerns.