The Cask of Moonlight

A love affair with a city in brilliant daylight and chiaroscuro, the poems of Irish poet Patrick Kehoe's second collection The Cask of Moonlight are for the most part set in Barcelona, a city of slow time and reflection, of "crepuscular, pastel-tinted shrouds" but also of vitality and luminance, a city that is both man-made and part of the greater natural world in which there can be no guarantees for "whatever nameless thing it was / that resembled love." Kehoe's lucid, light- handed lyrics brilliantly illuminate a time and a place, like a full moon over the "beehive ways of the city." His is already a distinctive voice in Irish poetry. PATRICK KEHOE was born in 1956 in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford where he still lives. Educated at St Peter's College, Wexford, he studied History and English at UCD. His first poems were published by the late James Liddy in Gorey Arts Centre broadsheets through- out the mid 1970s, while recent work appears in the Wexford anthologies, Red Lamp Black Piano and Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams, among other publications. His debut collection, Its Words You Want, was published in 2011, and includes 'Father', set to music by Sonny Condell. He taught English for two years in Barcelona between 1978 and 1980 (the genesis of many of the poems gathered here) and subsequently at second level in Ireland, before embarking on a career in journalism which has seen him write for In Dublin magazine, the RTÉ Guide, and now RTÉ's entertainment website, RTÉ TEN.