Hearing Voices

The poems in Hearing Voices are spiritual and evocatively material/physical by turns, frequently within the same piece: poems about death, love and the loss of love, time and its passing, war and torture and what it means to be human in our age, depression and survival. That is, the voices of the title that Michael McIrvin channels are daemonic in the ancient Greek sense. These poems not only honor the dead, and there are imaginative elegies herein as well as ghost stories, but also the dying (a daemon not as ghost but guiding spirit), which is to say the living in all our complexity. In Hearing Voices McIrvin manages to elicit the paradox of humanity: our suffering within the manifold mystery of being.