National Theatre

$15.95

John McAuliffe’s National Theatre dramatizes and values the performances of daily life, without ignoring those “noises off” with the power to disrupt our chosen lives. Subtle, revelatory, sensitively responding to a wide range of subjects (and to the lyric poetic tradition he inherits), the poems identify those moments of insight and vision which shape the lighting and staging of our imaginative lives. Here the aesthetics of the drama bear the exertion of gentle, often ironic, moral pressure. Like Horace, McAuliffe has great skill in observing the significance of the quiet life, asking if “it is / luck, instead—all of it— / to have a smallish house outside the fray.”

In this book, all the world’s a stage, as scenes shift from Ireland to Manchester, Paris and Bayeux, Bonn, Italy, and the Florida swamps. World leaders convene at a G20 summit in Rome, an influencer takes a series of selfies, the families of organ donors find quiet courage, and “a life swims / into the fortress of a formal device.” The renewable source of the poet’s craft remains the thing itself, whether meditating on roadside abandonments or a shed harboring a bag of unused golf clubs, observing the movements and disappearances of toads and mules in shrinking green spaces, reckoning with mortal thoughts as a plane steeply ascends, or lamenting and celebrating the absent subjects of moving elegies.

Praise for John McAuliffe

“This is a book which feels poised on its various precipices, looking backwards and forwards, waiting with an admixture of alarm and dawning recognition that ‘the world is more and more like an altered / photo of itself.’” —Declan Ryan, The Irish Times

“McAuliffe introduces a question central to this collection: how can we translate a failure? This is never answered; instead, McAuliffe skillfully positions poetry as a space to air out the questions.” —Poetry Ireland Review

“A darkly optimistic poetry sprung from the potentially dull suburban life, where McAuliffe, in poem after poem, salvages sprays of colour from out of the daily spin.” —Keith Payne, Dublin Review of Books

“Writing as good as John McAuliffe’s demands more readers—on both sides of the Atlantic.” —Daisy Fried