Here and There Brendan Mulcahy

The title Here and There was chosen to signal a poetry collection that places the emphasis on the movement and change which are inescapable features of human existence. The concepts "here" and "there" are bonded by experience, can be oppositional and can suggest in a conversational way the sense of being all over the place. In preparing the collection for publication, the author remembered Seamus Heaney's marvellous poem Postscript, which contains the lines, "You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass." The wisdom of Heaney's assertion - that the attempt to inhabit an unassailable Here is unrealistic - is deeply appealing and links to the need for a stabilising version of what Keats called 'negative capability' in navigating life's conflicting currents.

So, there are poems of migration and adaptation; poems of travel and reaction to other ways of doing things; poems of family evolution and change; poems addressing zeitgeist challenges like Brexit and the Coronavirus epidemic; poems that focus on Shakespearean characters in their attempts to manage unwieldy circumstance. And flights of fancy.

The poems in Here and There deal with continuity and change, movement and stability in challenging, sometimes frightening contexts. "Here" and "there" are relative concepts, interchanging with surprising ease. Adaptability emerges from a reading of these poems as the crucial behavioural factor if we are to lead lives enriched by confidence and optimism.