‘Life had darkened for him’

I LEFT Cork City in 1971, a graduate of UCC, having studied under some great teachers (Seán Lucy, Seán Ó Tuama and Risteárd A Breatnach).

I grew up in that city, spending my earliest years in Turner’s Cross, and going to school there and at Coláiste Chríost Rí, where a love of learning, language, and poetry was imparted by some passionate teachers.

I have written, I suppose you might say, a fair amount: criticism, poetry, drama, and so on. But this book, and not just because it’s my most recent, is the book that means the most to me, and to my wife, Angela, a native of Cork like myself, she from Mayfield, a ‘northsider’. And this is because it is a book about one of the most tragic things that can come into any parent’s life, the death of a son or a daughter. In this case the cause of death was drink, our son, Egan, having been cursed with that most appalling illness: alcoholism.