River Crana, The

‘My father’s father took his chance/on the first flight over Lisfannon.’ So begins a poem in Frank McGuinness’s eighth collection, The River Crana, a book equally at home in Donegal as Japan and ancient Illyria. His poems have been praised by Seán Hewitt in The Irish Times for their ‘dark contours and gothic atmosphere, their sensory detail and sly humour’ — traits clear in this new book in which ‘Buncrana, Christmas Eve’ is vividly evocative of the author’s home town in his childhood. From poems of empathy with the death of Sylvia Plath and the lost children of Pompeii, anything is possible: ‘I might yet learn,’ he writes, ‘to drive a lorry.’