Under A Mind's Staircase

"Reading Robin McNamara's Under a Mind's Staircase is like taking a journey through the human condition. McNamara masterfully conveys the idea of the unreachable: the sense of something forthcoming, acts of grasping at straws, and an eventual falling away. Achingly beautiful and expertly written, McNamara's poetry will leave you asking yourself questions about the complexities of our reality."

Elizabeth Bates.

EIC Dwelling Literary & Pushcart Prize nominee USA

"McNamara's poems teem with images from the natural world, from this world and other worlds, and from what he himself calls 'tides and seasons'. Often he is subsumed in nature: 'The lichen and moss grows/so slowly over my mind.'

There is an underlying sense of betrayal here, betrayal by old loves and critics, by the education system and even by nature itself: 'When the winds rustled through/The yellow fields of corn,/I thought of a safe place,/A place I'll return to with/grey hair and creaking bones.'

But the 'safe place' is always threatened, never quite what was promised, and there is a constant striving in the poems for inspiration. This is especially true when McNamara writes about writing itself, battling uncertainties and rejections and, in one poem, trying to conduct the muse: 'Can you shape a melody/that shows how I see you/in blue, sweetness, strumming sounds?'

There's humour too, a gentle smile in A Nun on a Bicycle, but a blacker humour in poems like It's Quite Mental Really: 'I tried to take a walk but/my Agoraphobia said/"I'm back, bitch."

Catherine Ann Cullen.

Poet In Resident at Poetry Ireland