Catherine Phil MacCarthy

Catherine Phil MacCarthy Poems

Catherine Phil MacCarthy Biography

Catherine Phil MacCarthy was born in County Limerick in 1954 and educated at University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, and Central School of Speech and Drama, London. She has taught at Waterford Institute of Technology and at The Drama Centre, University College Dublin. Indeed, the influence of drama is evident in her ability to sketch character and build poems to a climactic, dramatic resolution. MacCarthy began writing full time in 1999, and has since received the Fish International Poetry Prize , the Dromineer Poetry Prize and the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award. Her most recent collection The Invisible Threshold (2012) was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.)

The Best Poem Of Catherine Phil MacCarthy

Skojcan Journey

Across the bleached stepping stones,
river down to a soundless trickle, lazy pools
lukewarm in the shade, we speak of the rains
that flooded the canyon last summer,
trace the high water-mark by driftwood
sticks high above our heads, a tangle
in branches of a linden like the nest
of some great bird - eagle, or peregrine falcon
we've seen riding the thermals in pairs
above the cliffs, four, skyward, circling
into azure further than the eye could see,
or maybe a crane, last glimpsed with fox
in the fresco of a tiny church. Black,
the magnesium line stains limestone walls
way up so that even now a tumult rages
and we are treading the Reka river-bed,
hands loosening our boots while we float
free, water-sprites in the chasm of a deep rush,
our hair standing on end, amidst a melee
of drowned debris, branches of morello
and plum, berries of wild fruit, stalks
of flowering cyclamen, lizard, snake
and wolf, all swept past the broken mill-
wheel, through the gorge mouth, down and down
through timeless caves, where only this
river flows, coursing into the underworld.

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