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The Hurley Maker's Son
Patrick Deeley's train journey home to rural East Galway in autumn 1978 was a pilgrimage of his giant of a father had been felled, the hurley-making workshop silenced. From this moment, Patrick unfolds his childhood as a series of evocative moments, from the intricate workings of the timber workshop run by his father to the slow taking apart of an old tractor and the physical burial of a steam engine; from his mother’s steady work on an old Singer sewing machine to his father’s vertiginous quickstep on the roof of their house. There are many wonderful descriptions of the natural world and delightful cameos of characters and incidents from a not-so-long-ago country childhood. In a style reminiscent of John McGahern’s Memoir , Deeley’s beautifully-paced prose captures the rhythms, struggles and rough edges of a rural life that was already dying even as he grew. This is an enchanting, beautifully-written account of family, love, loss, and the unstoppable march of time.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published April 7, 2016
6 people are currently reading
26 people want to read
About the author
Patrick Deeley
19 books1 followerPatrick Deeley is a teacher and poet.He also runs a workshop in Ballyfermot, specialising in children's poetry. Originally from Loughrea, County Galway, he has spent more than half his life teaching in Dublin.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 19, 2016
Beautiful and lyrical stories of growing up in the West of Ireland...
May 21, 2017
It can be very difficult to review a memoir. It is difficult to pass judgment on the way another person tells their story. But, as it's out in the world, it becomes the right of the reader to do so. I was deeply captivated by the first 25 pages of this book. It was exactly the sort of book I wanted to read; evocative prose, necessary details, and a portrait of a son and his father. Had the book continued this way, I would have given it 5 stars.
However, by page 50, I felt the book lost focus. By page 100 I was getting impatient with the seemingly random stories told in a seemingly random order. By page 150 I thought the book should have wrapped up. Then, I realized there were another 100 pages left. And this, the length, turned out to be my real issue. Normally, I would consider 250 pages to be a relatively short book; I just felt that this particular book didn't hold enough narrative momentum to justify that length. Had the author cut 100 pages, I would have enjoyed the combination of lucid prose and tight narrative focus. As it stands, I loved certain passages, but by the time the book came to a close I was happy to move on.
However, by page 50, I felt the book lost focus. By page 100 I was getting impatient with the seemingly random stories told in a seemingly random order. By page 150 I thought the book should have wrapped up. Then, I realized there were another 100 pages left. And this, the length, turned out to be my real issue. Normally, I would consider 250 pages to be a relatively short book; I just felt that this particular book didn't hold enough narrative momentum to justify that length. Had the author cut 100 pages, I would have enjoyed the combination of lucid prose and tight narrative focus. As it stands, I loved certain passages, but by the time the book came to a close I was happy to move on.
July 27, 2016
Patrick Deeley’s , born 1953, spent the first 20 years of his life in townland between Ballinasloe and Loughrea in Co Galway. In a prose style familiar to students of the late great John McGahern, Deeley brings to life, from the pages of this excellent novel, his native place, the fields and townlands, his family, schooling and local characters. Deeley is of that Irish rural post-war generation, my father’s generation, that knew that he was destined to leave when the future came.
It’s the emotional investment Deeley makes in this autobiography that makes The Hurley Maker’s Son such a heartfelt and poignant work, a lament to times past and a coming of age of a talented, bookish student, somewhat out of place in the environment of the hurley maker.
The lament is for the hurley maker, his father, a good man who loves his family and whose premature accidental death while felling timber knocks over Deeley emotionally, striking him with a grief that for some time he cannot deal with or face up to. This difficulty initiates an extended self-examination of his youth and an analysis into the history of the hurley maker and son who, despite their closeness, were unable to forge an attachment in the place where it evidently mattered most within the family – the workaday world.
‘Industry’ seemed to be one of my parents’ favourite words’, Deeley tells us. But he could not quite live up to their ethic of doing or their expectation of artisanship. He was distracted by more cerebral thoughts, “a dreamer”, shy, inattentive, useful when it came to heavy lifting but not able to make much of a fist of the plane, saw or the spokeshave.
“The shed where his craftsman father turned his hand was a pleasure palace to the boy. The scent of cut wood, the names of trees and tools, the flow of the finished product from handle to boss, were a delight, an education of the senses, a grounding in aesthetics.”
(The above paragraph was copied from a professional review in The Irish Times).
The suspicion that there would be more pleasure in participating than in looking on proved a challenge to Patrick, who somehow kept going against the grain of “industry”. He withdrew and acted out to such an extent that the shed seems like a site of primal differences – even though there was an obvious bond between father and son and blatant conflicts were rare.
Obviously not cut out for eye-and-hand work, Patrick also suffered from the fact that “displays of fondness were in short supply in our house”, like many Irish families of that time. This was not because his people were not loving, “but because in the way of that time such things weren’t done”. The consequences of this emotional woodenness are given their full melancholy measure and are described with great skill and no little sentiment.
Still, the brighter times within the family are not overlooked. These are provided in the first instance by the novels other primal place, the Callows, a wetlands adjacent to the homestead, but essentially its equal and opposite. A refuge, a playground, a wonderland – nothing in the Callows was predictable. Instead it was disorderly, mystical in ways, but, invigorating to a young Deeley. “I never felt less lonely than when alone there,” he recalls. The allegory that the author constructs between a terrain that is slippery underfoot and the young man’s uncertainty of his own ground is construed by the reader.
A drainage system in natural and symbolic senses of the term, the wetlands also hones Deeley’s alert and sensitive eye to the natural scene, the colours and creatures of which give him something that he could make his own of.
Deeley supposedly has written in his acclaimed poetry of his discovery of the living stream, the freedom of solitude, and of being absorbed by nature. “Only while idling in the Callows could I hope to forget myself”, not realising at the time, of course, that this is the kind of loss that is all gain.
There are other strands to the novel, including comments on changes in east Galway (the Tynagh mine’s economic and environmental impact, among other things), tales of loving and of travel, and stories of educational misadventure, culminating in a moment of clarity when Deeley decides to pursue a calling to teaching as a profession.
A successful teaching career and there are affectionate vignettes from the author’s Ballyfermot school years, not least those showing “the songs and folktales” that came with children’s families from the inner city to be sources of instruction and reservoirs of memory.
Dublin as Patrick Deeley and many of us Dubliners recognised it in 1973 he described as “dilapidated and gapped”. But Poetry Ireland was then in the making, galvanised by the likes of a youthful and perceptive Dermot Bolger and his Raven Arts Press and the glimpses of this emerging poetry renaissance convey not only Deeley’s enthusiasm, but, point to the evolving role of memoir as informal history and provider of the insider’s view.
Teaching didn’t take in the hurley, farm implement and furniture maker’s sawmill, and the Callows was replaced by the dense and winding Dublin City streets. Yet leaving those primal places of one’s youth turns out to be a way to completion.
“Opposites lead to reconciliation. Wood and water, standing and running, cutting and flowering, seemed so at odds in the home place. In time, however, a more appeasing truth emerges from accepting them as complements. This hard-won state of acknowledgment, stated with honesty in plainsong prose, is the ultimate achievement of The Hurley Maker’s Son.”
(The above paragraph was copied from a professional review in The Irish Times).
The final chapter, when Deeley recalls his final face to face meeting with his father, a father who he sadly realises is getting older, but, between whom there is an obvious affection, though inhibitedly expressed - we Irish sons and fathers are masters of this paralysis - is a suitable climax to what is a very well written biography of a young Irish country boy, loved by his parents and family, eventually reluctantly leaving the security of his home, a necessity to come of age as a young man. The last paragraphs, particularly upsetting, will be reread by the reader and will resonate with any son who has had a close attachment to his father.
It’s the emotional investment Deeley makes in this autobiography that makes The Hurley Maker’s Son such a heartfelt and poignant work, a lament to times past and a coming of age of a talented, bookish student, somewhat out of place in the environment of the hurley maker.
The lament is for the hurley maker, his father, a good man who loves his family and whose premature accidental death while felling timber knocks over Deeley emotionally, striking him with a grief that for some time he cannot deal with or face up to. This difficulty initiates an extended self-examination of his youth and an analysis into the history of the hurley maker and son who, despite their closeness, were unable to forge an attachment in the place where it evidently mattered most within the family – the workaday world.
‘Industry’ seemed to be one of my parents’ favourite words’, Deeley tells us. But he could not quite live up to their ethic of doing or their expectation of artisanship. He was distracted by more cerebral thoughts, “a dreamer”, shy, inattentive, useful when it came to heavy lifting but not able to make much of a fist of the plane, saw or the spokeshave.
“The shed where his craftsman father turned his hand was a pleasure palace to the boy. The scent of cut wood, the names of trees and tools, the flow of the finished product from handle to boss, were a delight, an education of the senses, a grounding in aesthetics.”
(The above paragraph was copied from a professional review in The Irish Times).
The suspicion that there would be more pleasure in participating than in looking on proved a challenge to Patrick, who somehow kept going against the grain of “industry”. He withdrew and acted out to such an extent that the shed seems like a site of primal differences – even though there was an obvious bond between father and son and blatant conflicts were rare.
Obviously not cut out for eye-and-hand work, Patrick also suffered from the fact that “displays of fondness were in short supply in our house”, like many Irish families of that time. This was not because his people were not loving, “but because in the way of that time such things weren’t done”. The consequences of this emotional woodenness are given their full melancholy measure and are described with great skill and no little sentiment.
Still, the brighter times within the family are not overlooked. These are provided in the first instance by the novels other primal place, the Callows, a wetlands adjacent to the homestead, but essentially its equal and opposite. A refuge, a playground, a wonderland – nothing in the Callows was predictable. Instead it was disorderly, mystical in ways, but, invigorating to a young Deeley. “I never felt less lonely than when alone there,” he recalls. The allegory that the author constructs between a terrain that is slippery underfoot and the young man’s uncertainty of his own ground is construed by the reader.
A drainage system in natural and symbolic senses of the term, the wetlands also hones Deeley’s alert and sensitive eye to the natural scene, the colours and creatures of which give him something that he could make his own of.
Deeley supposedly has written in his acclaimed poetry of his discovery of the living stream, the freedom of solitude, and of being absorbed by nature. “Only while idling in the Callows could I hope to forget myself”, not realising at the time, of course, that this is the kind of loss that is all gain.
There are other strands to the novel, including comments on changes in east Galway (the Tynagh mine’s economic and environmental impact, among other things), tales of loving and of travel, and stories of educational misadventure, culminating in a moment of clarity when Deeley decides to pursue a calling to teaching as a profession.
A successful teaching career and there are affectionate vignettes from the author’s Ballyfermot school years, not least those showing “the songs and folktales” that came with children’s families from the inner city to be sources of instruction and reservoirs of memory.
Dublin as Patrick Deeley and many of us Dubliners recognised it in 1973 he described as “dilapidated and gapped”. But Poetry Ireland was then in the making, galvanised by the likes of a youthful and perceptive Dermot Bolger and his Raven Arts Press and the glimpses of this emerging poetry renaissance convey not only Deeley’s enthusiasm, but, point to the evolving role of memoir as informal history and provider of the insider’s view.
Teaching didn’t take in the hurley, farm implement and furniture maker’s sawmill, and the Callows was replaced by the dense and winding Dublin City streets. Yet leaving those primal places of one’s youth turns out to be a way to completion.
“Opposites lead to reconciliation. Wood and water, standing and running, cutting and flowering, seemed so at odds in the home place. In time, however, a more appeasing truth emerges from accepting them as complements. This hard-won state of acknowledgment, stated with honesty in plainsong prose, is the ultimate achievement of The Hurley Maker’s Son.”
(The above paragraph was copied from a professional review in The Irish Times).
The final chapter, when Deeley recalls his final face to face meeting with his father, a father who he sadly realises is getting older, but, between whom there is an obvious affection, though inhibitedly expressed - we Irish sons and fathers are masters of this paralysis - is a suitable climax to what is a very well written biography of a young Irish country boy, loved by his parents and family, eventually reluctantly leaving the security of his home, a necessity to come of age as a young man. The last paragraphs, particularly upsetting, will be reread by the reader and will resonate with any son who has had a close attachment to his father.
March 22, 2023
Poetry in the reading. Had memories of my father's workshop with its bandsaw, not nearly as temperamental.
April 9, 2024
A beautifully-written memoir.
July 28, 2025
Great book
August 20, 2016
Poet Patrick Deeley‘s wonderful memoir of growing up in 1960s Galway is a love letter to his parents, the melancholy wonder of solitude, and a rural way of life that was already on its last legs when he was a child.
Beautifully written, this is an exceptional memoir.
Beautifully written, this is an exceptional memoir.
January 10, 2017
I am finished with this book, although I didn't actually finish it. I am a Hurley Maker's daughter, which is why the title attracted me. The book bored me to pieces. I reached almost halfway, then decided life was too short and too many worthwhile books awaited.
September 17, 2016
Beautifully evoked by gone era ...
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews