By Alice M. Vollmar

"If you can get it right where you live, then you can say something universally," observed Irish poet Michael Coady, recipient of the 2004 Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. "The universal things happen everywhere."

Coady traveled to St. Paul, Minn, from Ireland this spring to accept the University of St. Thomas Irish Studies Department eighth annual award honoring Irish poets. The two of us talked in his host's living room on an uncharacteristically balmy Minnesota March afternoon, Coady's pale lilac shirt a hint of spring.

To be chosen for the award surprised and delighted Coady. "It was a wonderful experience to get the phone call sitting in my house in my hometown in Ireland," he said.

His home of Carrick-on-Suir (pronounced 'sure') is a town of 5,000 people in southeastern Ireland's Co. Tipperary. Here the articulate and trim Coady was born in 1939 and still lives today.

"It just happened that, unlike most writers, I am a writer living where I grew up," he told me and reiterated later in his stay, during a Twin Cities book talk. Speaking to that group, his direct gaze and modulated voice engaged listeners, as if his words were personally directed to each of us. Coady took a teaching job in a boys’ school in the town where he grew up and stayed on, retiring after 30 years. "In fact, I've been here long enough that I've taught nearly every man in a certain age cohort," he laughed.

The author of several collections of poetry: Two for a Woman, Three for a Man (1980), Oven Lane (1987), All Souls (1997) and One Another (2003), Coady draws his readers into the past and present, to rub shoulders with the people, to soak up the sounds and smells and very life of a place. 

Flesh out the inventory with snores and singing,
boiled potatoes and the aftersmell of cabbage,
copulation, defecation and death-rattle,
glint of glass and amber eye of whiskey,
melodeons and chamber pots and sides of bacon,
fires alight and rain against the windows,
steam and coins and candles and
the grey rewind of mornings after....

-- "Invisible Hotel" (Oven Lane)

Coady writes out of and about Carrick-on-Suir:—"I know a lot of the people living in Carrick-on-Suir today - that's the horizontal aspect - but I know the vertical aspect, too, the things that happened and the people who were here over the years. My long poem, 'All Souls,' is a walk through the town, ending up back at home, getting into bed with my wife."

An intriguing walk that turns out to be for his readers, a meld of past and present on a foggy night, between the village pub and his home:

...on this grounded night I meet them all.
There's old Dick Bromley drunk as a lord
and fined in 1790 for leaving
the whole town timeless for most of a month
because he neglected to wind the clock,

and here's Mag Delaney at the West Gate
hearing her own last Act of Contrition
under the wheels of a Crossley Tender,
.....
Then, as if led on by remembered heat,
I pick up the scent of deep fat frying,
and though it's hard to fathom north from south
my foghound nose navigates my mouth
in to Ella's for black pudding and chips
and yes to the salt, and yes to the vinegar
before I reel out again in billows of steam...
.....
past my grandfather leading the band
from the opening day of Davin Park
by houses whitewashed for the Eucharistic Congress
and marching home to die in six months... 

— (All Souls)

Multi-talented Coady, a former-teacher, trombonist and photographer, brings us into intimate acquaintance with his town's life and history, as well as a painful piece of his family history quite amazingly brought to resolution through a poem he wrote, "The Letter," published in Oven Lane.

Coady wrote the poem about a bitter event in his family's past involving his great-grandfather, James Coady, who emigrated to America after his wife died in childbirth, leaving behind his only living son, Michael Coady's grandfather. Raised by James Coady's father, the child felt abandoned. After 30 years of silence, James Coady sent one letter begging forgiveness, which his son tore up and burned without answering.

Coady's poem about that letter broke the long silence and set off a chain of events culminating in the poet's trip to Philadelphia in 1991 to visit the places where the remarried-and-again-widowed James Coady had lived out a poverty-ridden life, as well as his parish church and gravesite. 

In fact, Michael Coady read a poem in a church on the very spot where James Coady had married his second wife in 1886 - a reading which prompted Irish Americans to share with the poet their own immigration stories of separation and loss. As an act of resolution, the poet took earth from the American gravesite of his great-grandfather to sprinkle on his own grandfather's grave in Ireland.

Having effected a healing of a bitter family wound, Coady now wonders about the silence overlaying other Irish families' immigration hardships, the stories repressed or lost, the stories never told, "the tragic undertow of the unsaid." He has noted that his journey to America to track down his lost relative is unusual; typically, Irish Americans travel to Ireland seeking family roots, not the other way around. It is heartening to Coady to see Irish studies in American universities developing in recent years, to see Irish heritage people "coming to serious grips with their culture."

Coady came into his poetic voice "late," he said. He started writing poetry in his late 20s, but had always been fascinated by poetry. It seemed a natural thing for him, because his father wrote and recited poetry. 

"I grew up with poetry, and it enchanted me. In school, we memorized a lot and I've still got it in my brain. You could say I was influenced by Yeats and Shakespeare, surely, but really it was the Roman Catholic church that inspired me ... the litanies, all the symbolism and metaphor. And the writing of Seamus Heaney, who came from a farm background and used language in ways that were poetic... You know, I hesitate to call myself a poet," admitted Coady, "but it's nice when other people do."

Coady's latest book, One Another, also drawing on his locale, centers around themes of mortality, community and memory and integrates poetry with prose (folk tales and fables) and Coady's photographs. All Souls also includes a mix of poems, memoir and photography.

"I have a squirrel instinct," chuckled Coady, reflecting about the sources of his material. "I collect bits and pieces of things. Well, you know, I carry a notebook and jot things down."

And those collected jottings, from his 60-plus years in Carrick-on-Suir, together with his photographic files, give Coady the rich well of material from which his poems spring - vivid and detailed - telling the story of a small Irish town, nudging readers into realizations about their own life and time in this world. That connection happens because this Irish poet is observant and pays attention - absorbed with getting things right where he lives.

"I am fascinated by change and the mystery of time," said Coady, a keeper of memories in his town. "Joyce maintained that memory is the basis for imagination.... Everything is about story in the end."

More About Michael Coady:

Michael Coady and his wife, Martina, have three children, including a daughter, Lucy, who drums in the three-girl band Fair Verona. Michael Coady's poetry collections can be purchased through Irish Books and Media in Minneapolis, Minn., (612) 871-3505; from Coady's publisher, Gallery Press, at gallery@indigo.ie ; or from Amazon.com.