Knowing

by Pat Mullan

This is not a poetry collection. Yes, there are poems here. And other writing Sicilian Odyssey, a long ‘travelogue’ that sets out to capture my visit to Sicily; in ‘$48 dollars and a battered suitcase’ I get personal, capturing glimpses of my youthful escapade as an Irish emigrant to Canada and the USA. As I stated in the foreword to my last collection of poems, Awakening, I get most enjoyment from listening to a poet talk about the written work and the work in why a poem was written, the spark that ignited the vision, the snatch of overheard conversation, the incident that retrieves a past memory, the choice of words and imagery, the simple scene transformed, the need to be a witness. I have separated this work into those categories. I don’t think that any of my poems need an introduction. My work is simple, accessible, and unencumbered with intellectual reference; you won’t need a degree in English literature to enable you to comprehend it. Galway Kinnell, whose Selected Poems won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, takes issue with what he regards as two major misconceptions about poetry first, that it is unread, and second, that in order to be good, poetry should be “After the appearance of the great modernists, Eliot and Pound, when you really had to study poetry in graduate school to understand it, the audience for poetry was cut drastically, so when I started writing in the 50’s, poetry did have a small, specialized following. Since then there has been a dramatic change …” Even though this is not a collection of poems, I hope that you find that everything here has a good, hard sense of poetry. Pat Mullan, Connemara, Ireland April, 2013

93 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 3, 2013

About the author

Pat Mullan is a thriller writer and poet. He was born in Ireland and has lived in England, Canada and the USA. He now lives in Connemara, in the west of Ireland.

Formerly a banker, he is a graduate of Northwestern University's Kellogg School.

He has published articles, poetry and short stories in magazines such as Buffalo Spree and Tales of the Talisman. His poetry appears frequently in the Acorn E-zine of the Dublin Writers Workshop. Other short work can be found on the new AMAZON KINDLE.

Recent work has appeared in the anthology, DUBLIN NOIR, published in the USA by Akashic Books and in Ireland and the UK by Brandon Books. Recent short work was chosen by Oxygen Books for inclusion in 'city-pick DUBLIN', published this year (2010) to coincide with Dublin being chosen as UNESCO's European City of Culture.

He received two nominations: one for Best First Novel and one for Best Suspense Thriller at the 2005 Love Is Murder conference in Chicago. His novel, BLOOD RED SQUARE, was published in the US in 2005.

World Rights to his novels, LAST DAYS OF THE TIGER and CREATURES OF HABIT are available from his agent, Svetlana Pironko.

He has also entered the Digital Age with his anthology, GALWAY NOIR, available now on iPULP FICTION ( wwww.ipulpfiction.com ).

He is presently at work on a new novel.

He has also published the following on Amazon's new KINDLE reader:

JAMES DICKEY'S POETRY: The Religious Dimension

ELEVEN DAYS IN JULY: A Family Ordeal


He is a member of INTERNATIONAL THRILLER WRITERS and MYSTERY WRITERS OF AMERICA.