Book launch!

I am delighted to share that my book An Irish Life : Selected Poems of William Thomas Brennan has been published. It is a collection of poems written by my late father and are reflections on the life of his family, his local community in Tallaght (Dublin), and events in Ireland and the world. I am excited to take copies with me for my family when I visit Dublin this month.

The book will be available through bookshops by the end of June or start of July. It is also available HERE through Lulu where it was printed.

From the Preface

My father had both a love of words and a way with them that were evidenced in how he moved in the world. He possessed a confidence that the right word at the right time could warm the soul with laughter, lift the mind in inspiration, or sooth a heart in sorrow.

I was ten years old when my father wrote the first poem in this collection. As far as I, and my siblings, know, this is the earliest of all his poems. I remember him reading it to our family, the soft pacing of his voice matching the sound of silence and the sense of weariness of “The Watchman” on his rounds. I recall how he looked as he finished his recitation and raised his eyes from the paper on which he had written this short verse. He held a look of quiet satisfaction and pride. I imagine that satisfaction involved a sense of saying all that he wanted to say with just the right words. It was a look that would become familiar over the years when he read to me his latest piece. Later, when I moved to Japan, and then when I emigrated to America, my father would read his new poems to me over the phone. He would take his time, the pacing as important as the words. The familiar sound of satisfaction and pride carried in his voice matched the look I remember him wearing that first time he shared his poetry with us.

I was fortunate to spend many hours in my early years warmed by the glow of my father’s love of words. Perched on his knee while he sat in his armchair, or at the kitchen table, we worked together to fill in the neat white boxes of the crossword puzzles that were his daily ritual. I learned to read by spelling out the words with him, as he wrote the solutions. To this day I spell words the way he taught me, sounding out each syllable to convert the sounds to letters. I developed my writing skills taking turns to fill in the grid. It is because of my father that I remember many obscure three-lettered words that were like welcome guests showing up, over and over, to take their places at our puzzle party: cos, lea, lei, ode, roe, tar, and tor are just a few that keep me company to this day when I am solving a crossword or playing the endgame of scrabble. I think of my father whenever I bump into these old three-lettered friends.

Later, he introduced me to anagrams. I learned that sometimes a clue contained all I needed to arrive at the answer. My father would encourage me to look at what was in front of me, whether a word or a phrase, move it around, and see it from different perspectives until the solution presented itself. A life lesson wrapped in a game. It is this ability that I see in his poetry: how he would look at the world in front of him and move it around with words until it resettled on the page in a way that held meaning.

It is this striving to find meaning in the world, and his life, that strikes me most when I read my father’s poems. He wrote these poems for himself, sitting at the kitchen table, pen in hand as he worked with his words. He wrote these poems with a purpose. It was as though he was compelled to bring his thoughts to the page. He shared these poems with a few people outside the family: a friend, neighbour, or some professional person in his world, particularly if they were directly connected to the topic of the poem.

The collection of poems you hold in your hands contains those that my father gave to me for safekeeping in the early 2000s, plus others I was able to track down for inclusion. There may well be other poems out there that come to light sometime in the future. For now our family is grateful to have so many gathered in this volume to honour and remember his words and his voice.