Loose Connections

Following his acclaimed When Love is Not Enough: New & Selected Poems, this new collection sees Maurice Harmon re-examining one life''s loose connections: departure to boarding school, family separations, an extra-marital affair, sexual pleasure and sexual abuse, misunderstandings between fathers and sons. Evil is encountered in the home, the church and the doctor''s surgery – offset by the beauty of a woman in a Dublin café, flowers in Achill, horses in the field, a snow-capped mountain.

"Harmon displays an ability to combine tenderness and pathos with a fiercely unsentimental honesty."
Paul Perry, The Irish Times

Maurice Harmon, former Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, is a distinguished poet and literary historian. He has written studies of William Carleton, Mary Lavin, Seán O''Faolain, Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, John F. Deane, Peter Fallon and Dennis O''Driscoll. He edited the pioneering anthology Irish Poetry After Yeats (Little, Brown, 1988). His Salmon poetry collections include The Last Regatta (2001), The Doll with Two Backs (2004), The Mischievous Boy (2008) and When Love is Not Enough: New & Selected Poems (2010). His Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland, a translation of the medieval compendium Acallam na Senórach, was published in 2009. He lives in Dublin.