Thomas McCarthy & Ruth Padel

Following upon Thomas McCarthy’s earlier collections Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019), Plenitude marks a moment of completion and buoyant plenty in a very real and contemporary Irish world. Enriched at all times by a sense of history – the precise histories of heritage gardens, of novelists such as Molly Keane and Waterford neighbours who had gone to the Great War – his is a poetry of both brief formal lyric and longer historical meditation. A working gardener since early childhood, his thoughts return constantly to images of seasonal change within humanised landscapes, to flowers, trees and changing seasons. The plenitude of the present moment in Ireland, its unexpected prosperity, is constantly prised open to reveal painful childhood memories and stressful political meditations. With Thomas, the past, and the past remembered, is never far from the surface of the poems, and Plenitude contains many such illuminated moments, whether the poet is walking in the great Fota House gardens or pausing at a winter cafe in New York’s Upper Westside.

Ruth Padel’s Girl examines girl as individuation, girl as innocence and becoming, image of the vulnerability men project on the young female figure and may not want to admit to in themselves. In a moving retelling of the Christian story, Mary is a girl in a Primark T-shirt facing a life shaped by divine will. Unearthed from the Cretan labyrinth, a prehistoric Snake Goddess is reshaped by a male archaeologist. Between these evocative figures, myth turns personal. The poet looks back, in adventurous, delicately crafted lyrics, at snapshots of her own life, her mother, her daughter, and outwards at mythic archetypes from India, European fairytale, ancient Greece and the Urban Dictionary, exploring girl as soul, as creative energy and a sacred power of nature, vulnerable but unstoppable. ‘Listening to the snowmelt / of the patriarchy,’ Girl is an urgent and revelatory work for today.