Tom French New Poetry Collection

The Gallery Press in association with Meath County Council Library Service is hosting a reception to celebrate the publication of a new collection of poems by Tom French, Midnightstown,  in Dunboyne Library, Castle View, Dunboyne, County Meath at 7.00 p.m. on Thursday 5 June 2014. All welcome.

From the Gallery Press website:
Tom French’s third collection opens with the poet alone with his newborn son in a delivery room. Through what North described as ‘a heartbreaking quality of understatement’, he confronts and stares down extreme experience and praises the everyday.

An oncology diary is simultaneously dispassionate and moving. In language of calm power he registers a brother’s suicide and fraught relationships. He offers glimpses of a battle in World War I, while other poems observe saplings as they prosper and actors preparing a play. They record incidents in barbers’ shops and salvage materials from old newspapers.

Tom French is a custodian of family and local histories, a caring, careful celebrant of
‘our loved and unloved, living and dead . . .
the rest of the road home, the night ahead.’