Lives of the Saints

by Mícheál McCann

Mícheál McCann’s debut collection, Devotion, is a stately book — courtly, even.’ So wrote Declan Ryan in The Irish Times. In that rapturously received first book the author applied a modern setting, sensibility and set of references to a classic Irish lament. In Lives of the Saints he builds on biographical details of Christian figures and situates them in contemporary states of experience and emotion. Centrepieces of this eclectic collection are an ode to a recycling centre and ‘The Impossible Request’ in which the poet’s grandmother forgets that he has told her that he is gay (‘I know, pet, I know’) and asks if he has any girlfriends yet. Assured in its risks, vigorous in its enthusiasms, from its first ecstatic injunction Lives of the Saints is a collection to make one think and feel, then think again.

As I drive home, without shame, I decide on the name
of a girlfriend and her smile will be as wide as the morning.
— ‘The Impossible Request’

72 pages, Paperback

Published May 7, 2026

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I find scraps of prayers / and jokes left everywhere.” Mícheál McCann picks up Lives of the Saints, his second poetry collection, where Devotion (his first) left off, reimagining and recontextualising an Irish history into the modern day. Here he turns his attention to the more obliquely spiritual, namely the saints, bringing them into not only his Ireland but the Ireland of his parents and grandparents. There are many standouts, as one would expect from McCann: ‘Stephen, the First Martyr’, ‘Particular Passages in Novels’, ‘Francis at Thirty-seven Thousand Feet’, ‘The Interior Castle’, and the beautiful, ekphrastic ‘Gallery Walk’ are all poems I found myself rereading before I could move on to the next. McCann shines most where his keenly observed details meet a virtuous (but never pious) worldview of compassion, hopefulness, and love. Where he writes, “Oh this beautiful life, / I am led to think, / despite things going unbeautifully / beyond the lip / of the creamy window sill”, the lip of the sill anchors both the beautiful life in here and the “unbeautiful” things happening out there. “My God is love, not bloody / rulers”, he declares elsewhere, and “The only way to save myself, He’d say, is in love.” In rethinking the saints, and exploring familial and domestic love as a site of great spiritual promise, McCann rethinks what salvation means and how we might attain it. “I'd make my father a saint / for the fact he didn't pry / up a just-stained board, / splintered, attentively polished — / the colour of a swing-worthy tree — / with his beautiful hands, / and drive it through / the chest of the beast.” It’s an expectedly gorgeous and arrestingly clever collection from one of Ireland’s great contemporary poets.

[David Donovan · Rating 5 out of 5]

So beautiful and loving and full of brilliant acts of the ordinary that elevate the everyday to the higher place they deserve to be.