Thomas McCarthy - Poets in Cork

Cork is a city that has a rich literary history upheld by many poets and writers over the decades.Documenting national events, local events or even something that is happening right across theliving room these writers have allowed us to step back in time and reach into Cork’s history. Some ofthese writers have been educated in the grounds of UCC, Thomas McCarthy was one of thosewriters.Born in 1954, Thomas McCarthy was originally from Cappoquin, Waterford before moving to Cork toattend University College Cork. Although he did have an interest in the science side of educationMcCarthy wrote his first poem for a school magazine as a young child. While at UCC he became partof a resurgence of literary activity which took inspiration from John Montague. Montague’s death in2016 affected Thomas McCarthy deeply as he reminisced, “He meant so much. When we werestudents at UCC, you felt he way always going to be there, that he was immortal.” Among hiscontemporaries at UCC were names that are well known it Irish literary circles today; Theo Dorgan,Sean Dunne and Greg Delanty. Although writing poetry has been a part of McCarthy’s life since hewas about fifteen; UCC had a much larger literary scene and brought with it an environment wherehe could expand his interest in poetry.Thomas McCarthy had a successful start to his poetry career, winning The Patrick Kavanagh Award in1977 for his poetry collection The First Convention. Among the judges that year was a well-knownname in Irish literature, Seamus Heaney. This award, which honours first collections of unpublishedpoems, brought with it the promise that The First Convention was going to be something special.When it was published the next year in 1978, the public got a taste of the work of Thomas McCarthyincluding a piece called ‘State Funeral’. It starts by quoting Ulysses by James Joyce to set the scene ofthe poem. From there, the poem paints a picture of the funeral of Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irishnationalist politician who served as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. Set in 1891 itillustrates the correlation between the death of a nationalist MP and the political movements inIreland in the late 1800s. Seamus Heaney was not the only Irish poet who noticed McCarthy’s skill inwriting. Eavan Boland recognised him as ‘an assured and unmistakeable individual voice… The forceof perception is everywhere.’The First Convention was only the start of McCarthy’s poetry career as he followed on with asuccessive line of poetry collections throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A sample of these collectionsincluded The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Non-Aligned Storyteller (1984) and The Lost Province(1996). McCarthy still writes poetry today and one of his more recent collections, Prophecy, waslaunched at the Cork Book Fest in April this year. One of the poems in it, Ice Cream, is a reminiscentpoem that tells the story of a young boy’s relationship with his father. It shows how children lead byexample and if those telling them to eat healthy are not doing the right thing for their own bodiesthen children can rebel. It suggests a troubled relationship with his father. “My father was a verydifficult person. He was very depressed about the world and thought nothing good would come outof anything. So I had to teach myself optimism.”Now a retired librarian from Cork City library, Thomas McCarthy’s career in poetry so far isstaggering. He has been awarded with The Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize (1981); The Annual LiteraryAward, American Irish Foundation (1984); and the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award, Irish-AmericanCultural Institute down through the years. He was a Fellow of the International Writing Program inthe University of Iowa 1978/1979. He has brought out two collections in the past three years,Pandemonium (2016) inspired by the recession that began in 2008 and Prophecy (2019) his mostrecent collection.