This is not a poetry collection. Yes, there are poems here. And other writing too: Sicilian Odyssey, a long 'travelogue' that sets out to capture my visit to Sicily; in '$48 dollars and a battered suitcase' I get personal, capturing glimpses of my youthful escapade as an Irish emigrant to Canada and the USA. As I stated in the foreword to my last collection of poems, Awakening, I get most enjoyment from listening to a poet talk about the written work and the work in progress: why a poem was written, the spark that ignited the vision, the snatch of overheard conversation, the incident that retrieves a past memory, the choice of words and imagery, the simple scene transformed, the need to be a witness. I have separated this work into those categories. I don't think that any of my poems need an introduction. My work is simple, accessible, and unencumbered with intellectual reference; you won't need a degree in English literature to enable you to comprehend it. Galway Kinnell, whose Selected Poems won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, takes issue with what he regards as two major misconceptions about poetry first, that it is unread, and second, that in order to be good, poetry should be unreadable: "After the appearance of the great modernists, Eliot and Pound, when you really had to study poetry in graduate school to understand it, the audience for poetry was cut drastically, so when I started writing in the 50's, poetry did have a small, specialized following. Since then there has been a dramatic change ..." Even though this is not a collection of poems, I hope that you find that everything here has a good, hard sense of poetry. Pat Mullan, Connemara, Ireland April, 2013
