Cosmos Mariner

Mike Harding is well known as a stand-up comedian, playwright, poet, broadcaster and documentary maker. He first came to Ireland as a teenager when he hitched around the country heading ultimately for County Galway and the Aran Islands.Instilled with a love of the country by his Irish-Catholic family in Manchester, his love of Ireland was further deepened by one of his teachers at St Bede’s College, Manchester – Father Augustus Reynolds. Under his guidance the poetry of Yeats and the plays and writings of J. M Synge took the young poet by the scruff of the neck and sent him reeling onto the Liverpool boat standing with a sunburned thumb at the side of the long road west.Over the following years he returned to Ireland many times, cycling and walking, playing his banjo in sessions and writing; one result of his wanderings was the acclaimed travel and walking book Footloose in the West of Ireland (Pub. Michael Joseph).While working for the BBC on a feature programme on Irish folk singer Dolores Keane, Mike Harding found himself in Clifden and in an estate agent’s window found what would become his Irish home, a traditional cottage that had lain empty for almost twenty years with a rotted corrugated iron roof and neither doors nor windows. The view out over Cleggan Bay however was stunning.Two years of hard work turned it back into a home and it was in that home, while looking out over Clegan Bay that much of his latest book of poems The Connemara Cantos was written. Not all of these poems are about Connemara, they are also about Irish immigrants on building sites in Manchester, pubs in London and the beauty of Irish traditional music; but all the poems in this book were either written in or inspired by the very special place that is Connemara – not a county, not a political entity but perhaps something much wider – a state of the soul.

• The Trainspotters 7Nativity Play, Nice, France, Christmas 2018 8Cosmos Mariner – Destination Unknown 9The Million Dollar Fiddle 11The Cleggan Sonettinas 13The Killing Field Scheherazade 17From a Railway Carriage 19The Last Tramp in all England 21King Cotton 23Landfall, Small Island, Outer Hebrides 33Catastrophy 35Adlestrop Revisited 37That First Step 39Fool’s Gold 41The Curve of Love 44A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Eve 45Driftwood Maps 48A Murano Dagger 50Sweetheart 62Fír Na Mappa 63Unity Mitford’s Dream 65Hindu Kush Moon 67Mythologies 69The Long Acre 74Dancing at the Cosmic Ceilidh 76The Price of Sugar 78Warm Summer Grass 80The Paths 81The Corrandrum Vase 82Twitterstorm #Luther@Wurms 85Undine – A Love Story 88The Slap Bird 90Love on the Scarborough Train 91Paddy’s Rambles Through the Park 93Things You Will Never Know – #42 95Bells at Midnight – New Year – 2015 97This Morning War and Peace Was Sick 99A Letter from Connemara 101Moon Over the Bens 103