Keeper

by Mícheál McCann

Keeper is a collection of poems to treasure; loss, love, longing thread through as Mícheál McCann tackles the big issues of queerness, family, grief and relationships.

Genres: Poetry

36 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2022

Reviews

[Martin Moriarty]

“He begins to yell Mícheál, Mícheál and not in
disappointment or embarrassment as I thought
immediately, but to pull me from reverie
as the leather ball whirled towards my cheek.

The rasp in his voice not due to my softness,
I learned years later. No, it was how he lay
witness to a great pain careening towards me
through the cold air, and could not catch it.”

[Juliano]

“Keep chasing the sun long enough / and you’ll meet your shadow coming back.” In Mícheál McCann’s pamphlet Keeper, the elements and the spirit are alive and in conversation; as much in its quiet as its grandeur, the world is seen in its full, complicated, gloriously strange wonder. “My home is a window into flame”, he writes in ‘Marginalia’, an imagined epistolary poem from Arthur Vicars to Francis Shackleton. ‘Scully’, in its contemplation and pop-culture basis, is another standout, along with the biblical ‘John 20:15’, the painfully gorgeous, earthy ‘Tense’, the culinary-as-spiritual ‘Immanence’, and ‘Surreal’, whose final couplet is painfully resonant: “These are but the things I see. The very firmament / of things which shimmer and baulk strangely, reassuring me.” And then there’s the title poem, whose final stanza has such arresting love in it: “The rasp in his voice not due to my softness, / I learned years later. No, it was how he lay / witness to a great pain careening towards me / through the cold air, and could not catch it.”