Plenitude

Thomas McCarthy was born in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, in 1954 where he was educated at the local Convent of Mercy and subsequently at University College Cork. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries before retiring to write full-time in 2014. He was a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa in 1978–79 and International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994–95. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Assembly of artists and writers. He has won several awards for his poetry, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the O’Shaughnessy Prize and the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. His first collection, The First Convention, was published by The Dolmen Press, Dublin, in 1978 and his most recent collections, Pandemonium (2016), and Prophecy (2019), were published by Carcanet Press. A former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review, his journals, Memory, Poetry and the Party, were published by The Gallery Press in 2022 and his essays, Questioning Ireland, appeared in 1924. He lives in Cork with his wife, the photographer and heritage gardener Catherine Coakley, and they have two adult children, Kate Inez and Neil.

‘a poet of lovingly observed small details.’ — David Wheatley, TLS'No other poet comes to mind, living or dead, who has succeeded in engaging the political as poetic subject matter... McCarthy, it would seem, has been able to internalize the subject matter and given it the time to cool down and clarify, until his art can give it a shape.' — August Kleinzahler