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Product Description
Patrick Moran’s fourth collection, Reckonings , traces the poet’s journey from a rural upbringing, marked by religious fervor, to a world of fraught intensities and troubled legacies. Having charted his progress through a diocesan boarding school, where he takes his first, tentative steps as a poet, Moran next focuses on early adulthood, a period of existential questing and drifting, when he struggles to find a voice in the classroom and on the page. While the last section opens on a buoyant note, with a group of marriage poems, echoes of earlier turbulence are still heard, notably in “Spectral” where nightmares disrupt his sleep and memories rip open/ (his) delicate/ stitching. Indeed, the past – its mulding, its affirmations, its shadowing – pervades Moran’s reckonings in this whether in taking stock of his teaching career; in reassessing his heritage; or brooding, characteristically, on blighted lives and might-have-beens.
As Reckonings tries to keep faith with its formative influences, the poet bears witness, in these unsparingly honest lyrics, to his life and turning, as he observes in “Makings”,
his restless days
into jottings, numbered
as if the unrecorded life
were not worth living.
Table of Contents
I
Swoop 11
Traces 12
Snapshots 13
Plums 14
Foddering 15
Talking in My Sleep 16
Lives of the Saints 17
Caged Birds at Migration Time 20
Caught 21
Scholarship Boy 22
Leaving My Aunt’s August 1963 23
II
The Dean of Discipline Addresses Us 27
Alma Mater 28
The Glass Hall 30
The Thirty Years’ War 32
Nicknames 34
Stirrings 35
Mr. B’s English Class 36
Stray 37
My Last Ordination Sunday 39
Leavings 40
III
New Year’s 1975 43
Snow 44
Remedial 46
Juvenilia 47
Nightclubbing 48
Poker Sessions 49
In the Small Hours 50
Last Class 51
Writers’ 1982 52
Wild Oats 55
Dart 56
Remains 57
Afterings 58
1984 59
Dropout 60
Makings 62
The Grip 64
Divining 65
The Day Philip Larkin Died 66
IV
Beats 69
Rooks Nesting 70
Anniversary 71
Voice 72
Seam 73
Spectral 74
Whodunit 75
Reckonings 76
Class Reunion 77
Lessons 81
Funerals 82
Bulbs 84
Improvisings 85
Embryonic 86
Dressmaker 87
Delivery 88
Exposure 89
Faith of Our Fathers 90
About the author 93
These Salmon Poetry books have come into us unused and unopened but due to the storage in their last location they might have some scuffs or marks on the edges of the pages
