Charlie Gracie, Donal McLaughlin and Mairi Murphy are three writers with strong Irish roots whose childhoods, in the 1960s, coincided with the Civil Rights movement in the US and Northern Ireland. An awareness of these events has coloured the poems they write about emigration & immigrant experience.

‘The ties between Ireland and the West of Scotland are too many and too dense to think of unpicking. Blessedly, this rabble of glints expects no such thing from their poems or their readers, weaving instead from families, places and tales, at once disparate and related, a tricolour of poetries, as Irish as they are Scottish as they are Irish, whispering music, comfort and challenge into the ears of those who hear, of anyone who has ever suffered, has ever loved or has ever lost.’

 

—Christie Williamson, poet

 

‘This collaboration of poets makes for a deeply reflective but unsentimental collection. Mairi Murphy opens, dealing with the heredity of famine, poverty, and the grief of emigration. This is contrasted sharply by Donal McLaughlin’s haiku that are both political and unspeakably familial. Charlie Gracie closes with compassion and humour, inviting us to enjoy freezing beach volleyball and appreciate the many inconsistencies of people we love. Plus, it’s got a great title!’

 

—Jessamine O’Connor, poet and novelist

 

‘A Rabble of Glints describes at one point “the way the sun is” on the water in Helen’s Bay, Co. Down. The phrase captures much of the spirit of this collection: the moments of observation, realisation, revelation and, yes, epiphany, in the “day-to-dayness” of a particular kind that the poems engage with: hard-won from historical injustice and trauma. Here, the gentle humour of a priest leaving mass early, of beach-volleyball in “bikini bottoms and duffel coats” on that Helen’s Bay beach, of growing lilies and leeks, of learning and reading and song, emerge from the darkness of famine villages, the massacres at Derry and Ballymurphy, and from West of Scotland sectarianism. The poems are aware of darkness still —“the empty street/the night after/lyra was shot”—the precariousness of “day-to-dayness”. There’s the sweep of history and migration—people, families, whole communities “transported” or “carted” to Scotland and so a litany of place names runs through the book: from poet to poet, from generation to generation. Heroes are named—John Hume, Brother Walfrid—but only incidentally. The real heroes of A Rabble of Glints are those who endure, and then thrive, with a kindness and warmth that comes through in the moments celebrated by all three poets. What a triumph this collection is: three different poets perhaps, but what an amazing sense of coherence and narrative arc!’

 

—Anthony Cartwright, novelist

Please contact us.