Matt Mooney was born, a farmer’s son, in Kilchreest, South Galway in 1943. He was a graduate of UCG, a postgraduate of UCC and a vocational teacher in Listowel. ‘Steering by the Stars’ (2021) is Mooney’s fifth collection. His first ‘Droving’ was published in 2003, followed by ‘Falling Apples’ (2010), ‘Earth to Earth’ (2015) and ‘The Singing Woods’ (2017). ‘Éalú’, his Irish language poetry collection, was published in 2021. Winner of The Pádraig Liath Ó Conchubhair Irish Language Poetry Award 2018, and a prizewinner in the Ballybunion Arts Festival 2022. His poems have appeared in: The Blue Nib, The Stony Thursday Poetry Book, Vox Galvia, The Mill Valley Literary Review, Feasta, West 47, The Kerryman, Kerry’s Eye, The Galway Review and its anthology, Galway Advertiser (Ó Pheann go Pár), The Connaught Tribune, Pendemic, Live Encounters and in the following anthologies: The Amaravati Poetic Prism Multi-Lingual Anthology, Not the time to be Silent, in Musings During a Time of Pandemic, A World Anthology, and I Can’t Breathe.
He has been translated into Spanish and published in the literary magazines Cardenal and Palabrerías in Mexico, in the Italian publication, Immagine & Poesia and in two recent international anthologies, Canto Planeterio (biodiversity and climate change) and Ukraine/An Anthology of Poems on War. He is the Deputy Editor of The Galway Review.
A Review by Matt Mooney of ‘Where I’m From’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick O’ Donnell
If you have never met the author of this exhilarating collection of poems that will rock you, then you are missing out! But don’t worry you are about to meet her head on, as she was and as she is between the covers of this book because here you’ll find her without fear or favour, ina steill bheatha – as large as life:
‘Cartwheeling along the high grass in the yellow butter cupped field,
rolling with laughter down the bumpy grassy hill’
From the outset let’s be clear about one thing. We are dealing with a self-avowed ‘tomboy, a free-spirited wild child’ and of course if according to Wordsworth, and Sheila can wax lyrical like him at times, ‘the child is father of the man’ then surely he can be father of the woman no less. We are blessed with this fact in the book and in her person. Nothing has changed much inside. She still bubbles and sometimes boils over in her zest for life today and it’s plain to see that she is the epitome of the committed poet in her irrepressible enthusiasm for life and love and poetry.
So how apt is the title of her book? I don’t think you could get a better one. She says in true memoir style, in shades of Angela’s Ashes that has preceded her, with a razor-sharp memory:
‘I’m from a Saturday night scrub in a steel bathtub
with the smell of Carbolic and Sunlight soap’.
What you see you get and not alone does she not make any excuses for her wild and humble roots in what one might call the Inner City of Limerick in the second half of the twentieth century but she is extremely proud of them. She leaves nothing behind. Everything is lashed out on the table in her own inimitable way of putting things, in the language she was reared on and it’s certainly not that of the drawing room:
‘skates on the ice down-hill in a cracked-arsed basin’
or:
‘galloping bareback up and down our avenue
out in the pissing rain
way into the early hours’.
Old songs crop up here and there, songs like ‘Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore’, ‘Way down upon the Swanee River’ and ‘Dee-Ol-Ee -Ay’. They give the poems a true flavour of the past and equally arouse happy memories in us the readers.
As a matter of fact there is a lot to warm the heart in these poems. Her Nana and herself had a very close relationship and she portrays her character in clear lines in a poem about baking soda bread. She describes her putting the cross on the cake before she put it into the oven:
‘Now! There’s the crossroads that will lead the fairies astray’.
Not all of her poems are full of softness like that one. In her ‘Requiem for a Fisherman’ she writes about the sea angrily and with great effect, albeit in common language:
‘She can be a thundering scourge of a whore
who will challenge, cheat and torment you’.
In ‘Snatched’ she catches the true awfulness of the fate of babies born out of wedlock fairly and squarely, a mark of the quality and depth of her poems:
‘Who snatched you from your mother’s breast
and buried you in an overcrowded vault?
‘Twas not your mother’s fault’.
She does not shy away from the dark side of life in the streets when it presented itself to her either:
‘While the moon slowly sleeps
he needles his skin
signing his name
in the art of calligraphy’.
Her ‘Theresa’ poems are poignant and memorable. She writes in a fine lyrical style of good times spent with her under a bridge:
‘the sun filtering through the ribcage
of the waxed railway sleeper,
beneath the bower archway
we lapped up the fluorescent sun’.
Returning to the lyrical content in her work, when she came home ‘to the ploughed fields of my childhood that beckoned to me’ she says:
‘I leapt over brambled yellow hedgerows
gorse, bog and clumps of spike rushes,
my heart thumping’.
Limerick’s follow-up to Frank McCourt and Wordsworth gone wild, all in one.
Sheila Fitzpatrick O’Donnell is a native of Limerick City, now living in Shanagolden, Co. Limerick. She comes from a long line of poets/storytellers; her mother, known as Polly the Poet, encouraged her to pick up the pen. Her work has been published in many anthologies in Ireland and abroad. Sheila won the Desmond O’Grady Limerick Verse Competition in 2009 and 2011 and the Cuisle International Poetry Competition in 2013. She also won the All Ireland Limericks Competition in 2013. She was shortlisted for the Desmond O’Grady Poetry Competition in 2013. Her first collection, A Bouquet of Trilogies, was published in 2010. In 2014 Sheila and Bridget Wallace took the Poetry Chair Project to the streets for Limerick City of Culture.
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