Along the Flaggy Shore

In his tenth volume of poetry, Irish American poet Carlos Reyes returns once again to Ireland, to the townlands of Letterkelly and Cloonanaha in County Clare. These communities have informed much of Reyes’ work, including At the Edge of the Western Wave (2004), and The Keys to the Cottage: Stories from the West of Ireland (2015). For more than forty years Reyes has returned to West Clare to his second home and his second family.
The poems in this collection capture the stark rural life that now has mostly passed. Reyes attempts to gather the remnants of a way of life that was pushed aside and forgotten with the arrival of the “Celtic Tiger.” Sitka spruce has supplanted the peat bog, and the slane rusts in the barn. The iconic haycocks that dotted the countryside are now replaced with huge black bags of sileage.
This book paints a lyrical picture of a world gone. As Yeats’ said, a way of life “all changed, utterly changed.”