Poems 2000-2005

Included are some of the most disturbing and accomplished meditations on communal violence in Ulster, the province where Hugh Maxton now lives. He is currently completing a new volume of poems and working - at age of 57 - on a first novel.

Poems 2000-2005 is a transitional collection written while the author - also known to be W. J. Me Cormack, literary historian - was in the process of moving back from London to settle in rural Ireland.

It is also a vigorous contribution to the age-old dialogue between Sacred and Profane themes, questioning beliefs and pleasures, guilts and landscapes, poetic methods and prosaic realities.

Contents -- Adam in Paradise: Quartet - Renunciation -- Dedication Later - Deadlock - 960 -- PLANTED 5----Mersea Island--Questions for John Prine--Winter Solstice--Broken Long Measure--To the Memory of Lily Webster--Dry Lightning--Pellet--Moregrove--Dead Habitat--Uncle Peter's Purgatory--The Shuck--Herbal for Anna Hartnett--Legend of the Lamp Room--THE TROUBLED 33--Shelling Hill--Sermon on the Mountjoy Side-Step--Incident in the Life of Michael Davitt--Pellets of Stanza and Prose--No Sign Given to It--Clonallis, Late Summer--Nutting--The Broken Stile--Pomona--IXION'S WHEEL 57--Near Sizewell Beach--Not Yacht-Club--Eurydice--Rhymes for Eurydice--The Gardens Quartet--Up and Under--Allotments--LAST THING 75--Numbers for Josh and Abigail Cohen--Miserere--For Bice Portinari, For Example--Matin--Salt and Light--One Animal's Return--Nearby Drung, County Cavan--The Enlightened Cave-Colophon