Publisher's Synopsis
What Vanishes contains four sections: poems of place and displacement set in such far-flung locales as Budapest, Berkeley, Vancouver, Point Pleasant, and the skies above Australia along with Dublin, Ballybunion, Dingle, and Drumcliffe.
Poems of love and loss, engagement, alienation, and endurance; poems focused on music and musicians, from blues to bluegrass to punk to jazz; and "found" poems from sources as varied as Diane Arbus, Teilhard de Chardin, job postings, a calendar, a bus shelter, and a fortune cookie. Through this startling variety of poems in a range of forms from blank verse to free verse to "shaped" poetry runs a steady concern with what it's like to find and lose, to be lost and found, in a world in which our fate is, as Yeats has it, not only to be "in love" but always to love what vanishes.
John Menaghan, born in New Jersey, has lived in Boston, Berkeley, Vancouver, Syracuse, London, Dublin, Belfast, Galway, Gortahork, and Dingle, and presently makes his home in Venice, CA. Winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and other awards, he has published poems and articles in various journals and given readings in Ireland, England, France, Hungary, and the U.S. He has also had several short plays produced in Los Angeles. Menaghan teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he also serves as Director of both the Irish Studies and Summer in Ireland programs and runs the LMU Irish Cultural Festival.
