Synopsis
The first part of Thomas McCarthy's book collects his recent short lyrics. Part Two daringly recreates a forgotten period in the Anglo-Irish world: a Big House in the years between the World Wars, a FitzGerald ('Geraldine') family that has tilled the soil of County Waterford, absorbed its language and history, and sent young men back to British regiments, particularly the Irish Guards. Focusing on his Gaelic-speaking soldier-poet, Sir Gerald FitzGerald, and his man-servant, Paax Foley, McCarthy creates a fully imagined landscape of men escaped from Irish neutrality to fight against Fascism. Moving from ballad to prose poem, from mid-century Gaelic verse to County Waterford recipes, McCarthy mixes competing loyalties and readings of Irish history to create a single Irish narrative of exile and bereavement, of battles won and love lost and found. "Thomas McCarthy's The Last Geraldine Officer takes its title from Colonel Gerald FitzGerald of the Irish Guards, the protagonist of a one hundred and five-page sequence that follows the gathering of individual poems with which the book opens... McCarthy's faux-autobiographical mode consists of poetry, journal entries from WWII combat zones, and a range of recipes from traditional Waterford cuisine. Each recipe is accompanied by a note indicating its associations for FitzGerald: the idyll of the Big House with its woods, meadows, and river, the privileged order of his Anglo-Irish origins that political upheaval has relegated to memories..." Douglas Houston, Poetry Review "Part of McCarthy's achievement is to rescue the Big House and Anglo-Irish culture from the Merchant Ivory haze of Auld Dacency with its tragic sunsets and random rifle shots... In the range of sympathy, varieties of expressiveness and subtlety of evocation, The Last Geraldine Officer is a poetic achievement of the first order. Readers in Irish will savour the fascinating verse of the soldier-poet FitzGerald and readers in English will want to do one thing only, start all over again when they reach the last line lingering in the 'hot Ligurian weather.'" Michael Cronin, Poetry Ireland Review "The Last Geraldine Officer opens with three toasts to the times - to Anglo-Ireland and Britain from the Great War to the Iron Curtain - and to the characters - chiefly the 'Last Geraldine Officer' - that inhabit McCarthy's historical fictions here... This is not Georgian Society revivalism, though. Nor is McCarthy indulging in his version of the Yeatsian fantasy about Major Robert Gregory, for it is not accomplishments of a vanished class or of a privileged individual that matter... rather it is that a man beset by his class and country in its most difficult formative years, by obligations to art and nation conflicting like geassa of old, can perceive and treasure as his own another's moral response to human calamity." Thomas Dillon Redshaw, The Stinging Fly "... a really remarkable collection, a turning point for McCarthy and possibly for southern Irish poetry... These poems move with new lightness and even, sometimes, hilarity around what we can now say, even as he treats them here in different ways, are his subjects: politics; the Irish in Europe; a Waterford childhood, in the shadow of the Big House; the Party, from below; the domestic love poem; poetry." John McAuliffe, PN Review "Don't be surprised to find a recipe for soda bread and a recommendation (by a fellow writer) of lobster and peach-champagne as polar forms of sustenance in Thomas McCarthy's impressive new volume. Actually it's Mrs Foley's Brown Soda Bread, a reference to the eponymous cook conjuring quasi-Proustian memories for Sir Gerald Fitzgerald (a 'Geraldine'), McCarthy's personification of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy... Gerald is a fictional poet limned poetically, like opera characters who are themselves singers..." Nigel Jarrett, Acumen 67 Thomas McCarthy, born in County Waterford in 1954, was educated at University College, Cork. He received the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1977 and the American-Irish Foundation's Literary Award in 1984. His last two books are Mr Dineen's Careful Parade (1999) and Merchant Prince (2005). He lives in Cork and works at the city library. He is a member of Aosdána.
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