Selected Poems

John McAuliffe’s Selected Poems begins with poems of the senses, of place, of childhood memories from Kerry, and of calendar and life events. These early poems are often personal, a note maintained among later, broader perspectives. One constant throughout the Selected is that McAuliffe views his subjects with one eye toward the ordinary and the other toward what is distinctive and often surprising in it. In recent volumes, in poems grounded in Manchester, where he lives and works, there is a more cosmopolitan, indeed global feel to the poems, though he never loses respect for the ironic and local. In this regard, he is Horatian: poems justify the labor of the poet’s life within the margins of the poem itself, and the objects that occupied his early poems continue to occupy his later work. For all the changes in perspective which age and emigration may have brought, he observes the remaining vase coolly at home up there where it had been forgotten. The poet remains, like the blackbird, a creature of its mid-air qualms, / its clustered notes and afterthoughts and here-I-ams.