“ Poguemahone an immense, audacious novel a volcanic spray of vernacular, Gaelic-infused memory fragments and character sketches.” -Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal Once you’ve done that, gravity does the rest.” -John Williams, New York Times

“ Poguemahone is like a high dive: The toughest part of reading it might be convincing your feet to leave the board. Drinking song and punk libretto, ancient as myth and wholly original, Poguemahone is the devastating telling of one family’s history-and the forces, seen and unseen, that make their fate. Now she sits outside in the sun as her memories unspool from Dan’s mouth and his own role in the tale grows ever stranger- and more sinister.Ī swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue, Patrick McCabe’s epic reinvention of the verse novel combines Modernist fragmentation and Beat spontaneity with Irish folklore, then douses it in whiskey and sets it on fire. Young Una’s search for love in a seemingly haunted hippie squat, and the two-timing Scottish stoner poet she’ll never get over. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England. Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother Dan, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. One can only hope Poguemahone attracts a readership beyond its crowdfunding backers on Unbound because, in its haunting strangeness and blazing originality, it deserves far more than a cult following.A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue by the Booker-shortlisted author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto. With few exceptions, the novel in verse doesn’t much appeal to today’s mainstream publishers, and this is not only because verse novels are often awful, but also because even the good ones rarely find a large audience. As things darken there are fewer laughs, and the final pages are almost unbearably tense. The first half in particular is marvellously fresh and underwrought.

Poguemahone is, in content and execution, frequently astonishing, and galloping through a very long novel at the rate of three pages per minute is an exhilarating sensory experience. But compare the same extract presented as straight tting it out as prose makes it clear how artfully the material has been handled. My initial reaction was equivocal because, on a first reading, this lacks the punch and depth of poetry.

These memories, as recounted by Dan, are by turns hilarious and quite terrifying, moving fluently between the comic grotesqueries of Withnail and I and the ontological horror of The Exorcist. a bleakly comic, wildly original 600-page epic about loss, exile and mental illness, written almost entirely in lightly punctuated free verse.

Poguemahone by patrick mccabe