One of Kei Miller’s selected writers for the International Literature Showcase
“Queerness is just one part of McCann’s identity and it is folded into an intellect, a curiosity, a slight mischievousness that looks out to the world and notices its oddities and its disruptions.”
– Kei Miller
Poet, reader and community arts worker writing about the warmth of spirit
Mícheál McCann was born in Derry, and now lives in Belfast. His poems have appeared in journals across Ireland and the U.K. A pamphlet of poems (‘Safe Home’) was published by Green Bottle Press in 2020, and he was a co-editor of Hold Open the Door published by UCD Press that same year. Alongside completing his first collection, he is currently at work on a collaborative publication with Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe of Skein Press that is forthcoming in 2022.
‘Mícheál McCann’s engaging and elegant pamphlet of poems moves through what is, in some way, every queer person’s story, the motion from exile toward love. […] There’s a freshness to McCann’s gaze as he studies Irish landscapes and men’s hearts. And in his voice, too, a wonderfully flexible accomplishment: both straight-forward and artfully oblique, conversation and wrought’ — Mark Doty
‘Mícheál McCann’s poems startle, delightfully, with dextrous shifts of tone, register, reference point […] This warm-hearted and honestly complex work finds homes in unexpected places and draws forth the unexpected from home’ — Miriam Gamble
‘Derry poet Mícheál McCann’s first pamphlet, safe home, contains some of the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read. Identity, belonging, place and love, all rendered so openly; sculpted so exquisitely it “makes home glittery”. With the year that’s been in it, that’s pure magic.’ — Kerri ní Dochartaigh, The Irish Times “The Best Books of 2020”
“[McCann’s poems are] permeated by a sense of purity; his poems have a way of holding space for themselves.” — Grace Wilentz, Poetry Ireland Review 133
With climate, political, and inequality crises mounting, I am deeply touched and affirmed to be selected for the ILS, and to be brought into conversation with the other writers I am selected alongside.
Bibliography
- Safe Home, (Green Bottle Press, 2020)
- Hold Open the Door: An Ireland Chair of Poetry Commemorative Anthology (UCD Press, 2020)
Contact Mícheál
Personal
Twitter: @micklemccann
Website: michealmccann.net
Publisher
Green Bottle Press. Contact: Jennifer Grigg. Website.
Image credit: Jonathan Ryder
