Poetry by Michael Coffey
May 1, 1999 6 x 9 124 pages 978-1-56689-085-4
Poems that take the poet and the reader home, to a point of greater understanding of the past and comfort with the future.
The poems in Michael Coffeys 87 North map a complex journeyby car, by train, in spirit, in a poeticsfrom New York City, where he lives, to the environs of his youth in the Adirondacks, where he was raised by his adoptive parents in a town of about seven hundred people. In this book, I try to convey both the sense of living in a metropolis teeming with the impersonal and that of being in an expanded terrain in which everything makes sense, if only because one knows it so well, and everyone knows everybody. Named for the highway that runs from the bottom to the top of New York State, 87 North begins with a surreal guidebook invoking Indians, John Ashbery, and Max Ernst while still engaging memories of a rural upbringing, and ends with a simple family recipe. Throughout, the rhythms of city lifejazz riffs, traffic, overhead street dialoguealternate with epiphanies of the restorative power of language, memory, and experience.
Along the way, these poems examine Coffeys relationship to his parents and hometown and Irish-American roots. There is a bardic tradition in Ireland that puts certain responsibilities upon the poet to communicate. That was the poets job, not to be obscure but to tell, to interpret, to delight, to help grieve.
About the Author
Michael Coffey is author of poetry collections Elemenopy and 87 North, and the editor (with Terry Golway) of The Irish in America. The editorial director of Publishers Weekly, Coffey lives in New York.