There’s no place like home, Terry McDonagh writes. And he concludes that home is enough. Home for McDonagh is Cill Aodain where he has returned after spending many years in Hamburg, also home for him. Hamburg, he writes, is all about discovery where he can own up to the injured wolf in himself, an Icarus hanging between fire and water in the raging racket of life. Cill Aodain calls him back—like the poet Raftery, he found a way out but never escaped as life circles him back to where he began. McDonagh can hold imagined fields, fences, happiness and tears together in poems of beauty, sorrow, love, pain and loss. Two Notes for Home is a major collection from one of Ireland’s finest contemporary poets.
