Blaze: A Poetry Anthology

by Anthony McCann

This is Anthony McCann's second poetry collection. In Anthony's work, emotional depth, philosophical reflection, and social commentary walk hand-in-hand with childlike wonder and cheeky humour. A celebration of the ordinary and the extraordinary, Blaze is a warm embrace for the life we live. I live with my family in Bangor, County Down. As well as being a father, a husband, a son, and a brother, I have worn many other hats. Since 2012 I have worked as an international keynote speaker in leadership, culture change, and professional ethics. I also work as a coach, a writer, a broadcaster, a consultant, a songwriter, a voice actor, a caregiver, and a children’s entertainer. I am first and foremost a philosopher (‘a deliberately thoughtful practitioner, with a view to garnering broader insights about life, the universe, and everything’). As a philosopher, I am especially interested in what constitutes helpfulness and unhelpfulness in our lives, and how they relate to each other. My passion is exploration of the personal and political possibilities of proximity - of what is here, now, near, and with us in our ordinary, everyday lives. Over the years I have been exploring the place of kindness, generosity, gentleness, generosity, compassion, community and love and how they enhance human flourishing. Can we find the heart of being human in the art of learning as we try to live more meaningful lives? I am also exploring the ways violence, suffering, alienation, and oppression happen, often as a consequence of the best of intentions, and how we can understand these experiences with more subtlety. How can our futures be more helpful than our pasts? How do we want each moment to feel, for ourselves and others? How do we make a difference? How do we make the differences that we want to make? How do we know what we intend to be helpful is actually helpful? For more information about some of this work, please visit garaiocht.com. I worked as an academic for 20 years, including positions at the University of California, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Ulster, and Loughborough University. My core disciplines in academic work have been Irish studies, anthropology, music, sociology, folklore, museum and heritage studies, and peacebuilding. I have a number of albums of songs available on the usual digital platforms. I also release electronic sound-art compositions under the name ‘Woodfrog Conspiracy.’ I am launching an online learning and publishing platform for my philosophical and leadership work called ‘The McAdemy’ in early 2018, based at mcademy.online. If you’d like to follow my Twitter account, go to @anthonymccann

168 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 25, 2018

About the author

Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of four collections of poetry including Thing Music (Wave Books, 2014). His book Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a nonfiction prose work investigating the 2016 armed right-wing occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Anthony’s teaching, writing and research interests include 19th, 20th and 21st century North American Poetry; Political Theology; Political Ecology; Native American History; History of the Revolutionary, Constitutional and Reconstruction eras; Ecological History of the American West; Cultural Anthropology; Modern Latin American Poetry; and Anarchist thought and practice as it pertains to art-making, politics and other spheres of human endeavor. He lives in the Mojave Desert.