Ethna MacCarthy: Poems

Ethna MacCarthy (1903–59) was a Scholar and a First-Class Moderator at Trinity College Dublin where she taught languages in the thirties and forties before studying medicine. Perhaps best known to posterity for her relationship with Samuel Beckett and appearance in several of his writings, including the play Krapp’s Last Tape, she also had a remarkable influence on a number of writers such as Denis Johnston and A.J Leventhal, who she later married. After A.J Leventhal’s death, his papers were entrusted to Eoin O’Brien and among these were MacCarthy’s overlooked work, revealing a highly intelligent and culturally sophisticated poet. This collection, published here for the first time, unearths an exceptionally rich and intriguing body of work by a remarkable woman who was ahead of her time. MacCarthy played an important and creative part of a cosmopolitan and free-thinking post-Independence Dublin, publishing translations from Spanish and German poets before developing a highly distinctive style of her own. Her poetry contains exposed lunar and death-haunted landscapes, tales of multifaceted women, and subversive ideas around femininity. Her work highlights a gifted translator who artfully captures the feeling evoked by the original languages. According to Denis Johnston ‘she has never been shy, can be frank, and outspoken to a degree, is absolutely fearless, intolerant of mediocrity and finds it difficult to suffer fools gladly’. MacCarthy merits reappraisal as an intellectual presence in an age that did not often promote, if acknowledge at all, the woman’s voice. This unique collection of Ethna MacCarthy’s poems is published as an innovative first step in establishing her as one of the outstanding Irish poets of the mid-20th century.

There is plenty to admire in the rich, intelligent and beautiful collection of poems contained in this book, and there are many themes and techniques that might be expanded on, but when it comes to a truly talented poet, it’s best left for the poetry to speak for itself. -- Daniel Seery Dublin Inquirer
our posthumous edition is intended as the reclamation of her missing poetic voice and is dedicated to Ethna MacCarthy’s memory; a very special, multitalented and humane Irish woman. -- Eoin O'Brien Irish Times
This book certainly is that brilliant starting point, a female voice recovered, a beauty of a book; a precious, important gift to give to any young Dublin poet who is just about to begin a life in literature. -- Thomas McCarthy Dublin Review of Books

Ethna MacCarthy was raised in an upper middle-class Catholic family in south county Dublin that was steeped in literary and cultural connections. Her poems appeared regularly in Dublin and London and featured in the important US anthology New Irish Poets (1948). Poetry (2019) is the first collection of her poetry to appear. She died of throat cancer in 1959 in London.

Eoin O’Brien is an acknowledged authority on cardiovascular medicine. He has also published widely on Irish writing and medical history including his innovative study of Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Country (1986), and The Weight of Compassion & Other Essays (2012).     

Gerald Dawe is an Irish poet and Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin. Recent books of poetry include Mickey Finn’s Air (2014), The Last Peacock (2019) and a collection of essays, The Wrong Country (2018). He edited the ground-breaking anthology, Earth Voices Whispering: Irish war poetry 1914–45 (2008).

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