In the Coming of Winter

Dark, timely and unflinching, Frank Dullaghan’s increasingly confident and finely balanced poetry dives deeply into what keeps us human in difficult times — the textures of memory, the simple connections that bind us. Like Camus, he is prepared to ‘live to the point of tears’, knowing, as did William Blake that, ‘the deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.’ This is poetry that unsettles, that asks hard questions without pretending that we have the answers, that looks darkness and death full in the face, yet the collection is not a counsel of despair. In cadences that are as elegant as they are accessible Dullaghan’s poetry asserts that no matter how dark the darkness or how cold the winter, there is the bitter-sweet joy of life, and there is love.
I am one
of the old ones now, on my last bit of road
to Bethlehem, neither wise nor unwise,

but a witness, as the swallows fly south,
of the way endings can feel like beginnings,
if you come at them from the other direction.

(From ‘Flying South’)