Kathleen M McCann

Sail Away the Plenty Kathleen M McCann

With Sail Away The Plenty Kathleen McCann returns to the land of her ancestry, telling the story of the Great Famine, an Gorta Mór, in language as lean and sparse as its rawboned subject. McCann's cryptic style is ideally matched to her theme, the potato blight of 1845-1849, wherein a million died of starvation and another million emigrated: approximately a quarter of the Irish population. A mosaic of poignant vignettes taken from the historical record, a portrait of genocide as stark and strong as a woodcut- "Coffinless, / to horse-drawn carts, / all over Ireland/ the dead go out the door." This significant collection, laconically dramatic, illustrates how, more than a failed potato crop, the famine was a direct consequence of a passive war waged against the Irish people and their culture as British overlords exported locally produced food, "the plenty," that could have saved the people from starvation. To paraphrase Wilfred Owen, McCann's subject is . . . genocide, and the pity of it, the poetry is in the pity.

-Faye George

These poems gesture through memory to what is forgotten: Lives made less by history but still deserving of language. There are eloquent inventories here in skilled poems of the blight of famine, of emigration. Of suffering that ends only in silence. These are poems the reader will turn to and remember.

-Eavan Boland