Afterlife

According to Thomas McCarthy, Pdraig J. Daly "comments on life as if he was a mystic who had just come through the gates of the City". This sense of a mystical, even visionary dimension to his work probably gets us closer to its true nature than would the label 'religious poet', though Daly is never far from the subject of faith as it is encountered in his own life and in the daily lives of those close to him.

In this new collection he writes of the Afterlife of the title, of visions and versions of both Heaven and Hell, but also of the various afterlives, or Ages, we pass through here on earth. Struggling with the horrors of clerical abuse ("To our place of infamy, come, / Jesus, come"), he writes with particular tenderness about the younger members of his own wider circle, finding hope in their boundless imaginations, blessing and example in their love.


Pdraig J. Daly was born in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford in 1943 and is an Augustinian priest, working in Dublin. His poetry collections are Out of Silence (1993), The Voice of the Hare (1997), The Other Sea (2003) and Clinging to the Myth (2007). The Last Dreamers: New and Selected Poems was published in 1999. As a translator he has published Libretto, from the Italian of Edoardo Sanguineti (1999), Furnace of Love, from the Irish of Tadhg Gaelach O Suilleabhin (2002), Without Shoe or Horse, from the Irish of Uilliam English (2005) and The God-Madness, a selection of the Lauds of the Franciscan poet, Jacopone da Todi (1236-1306).