Date: Fri 01 March
Time: 4pm
Venue: St. Columba’s Church
Price: €8
What Michael Hartnett called “the long subtraction” began for Thomas Lynch on Christmas Eve 2012 with news of the death of Dennis O’Driscoll. This sadness was followed by the death in September of 2013 of Seamus Heaney, then Phillip Casey in February of 2018, Macdara Woods in June and Matthew Sweeney in August the same year.
These men of Lynch’s generation had been fixtures in his catalogue of poets, friends, correspondents and heroes and had kept his access to Irish poetry incarnate and alive. Their work in words, their powerful memories, attending their funerals were, of course, a sort of comfort. But their dead and goneness, their beyond our reachness, the hush where their mighty voices used to be remain real griefs. The power of their poems is undiminished and by keeping those poems in the discourse of poets and readers, we honour and celebrate their lives and their gifts of language.