Gardens of Remembrance

`The Gardens of Remembrance' is a moving testimony to the power of memory, childhood, and poetry by one of Ireland's finest living poets. Drawing on the rich landscape of West Waterford, from its Anglo-Irish gardens to the hidden town lands of Fianna Fail activism and de Valera worship, McCarthy brilliantly captures the personal life behind his poems and politics, as well as his experiences teaching at the Iowa Writer's school and at Minnesota's Carleton College. McCarthy also provides an excellent overview of Irish poetry over the past two decades, including pithy assessments of such Northern poets as Heaney, Montague, and Longley, Southern writers from Austin Clarke to Eavan Boland, as well as the newest generation of Cork poets. The Gardens of Remembrance is an insightful and honest portrait of one man's life as an artist and his homeland's noteworthy place in world poetry today.