on Mícheál McCann

The Outside Leering In

In Devotion, his debut collection for Gallery Press, the Irish poet Mícheál McCann imagines the murder of his partner and, in a strange and shocking act of poetic imagination, blinks him back into existence. In this way, McCann’s debut is a strong entry in the canon of what the poet Joyelle McSweeney calls the ‘necropastoral’, which renders the idyllic space of Arcadia, or the pasture, as a place where the ‘outrageous horrors of Anthropocenic “life” are made visible as Death’. In McCann’s collection, queer domestic life is made visible via death, and it’s this idea of death and resurrection – embodied in the nearly back-to-back sequences ‘Keen for A –’, and the shorter ‘Devotion’ – which drives the motion of this collection.

The beating heart of Devotion is a sort of astonishment which manifests in unexpected places. In ‘Forensic Report’ (the eighteenth section of ‘Keen for A –’), McCann’s speaker imagines his partner’s murder in great detail.

his aorta
was transected –
a vessel
that accompanied A –
through years –
and he was found

by a nurse
on her way to the night shift.
Saw the puddle growing. . .
He was breathing
very laboriously,
despite being gone.

This device has an unsettling effect: a shaking up of the psyche that readies readers for an unexpected payoff in the relative warmth of title-track ‘Devotion’: a set of poems which describe the brighter moments in the humdrum life of a couple. It’s this ...