Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, is looking after his sister Una, now seventy and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate. From Dan’s anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family. How the parents are exiled from a small Irish village and end up living the hard immigrant life in England. How Dots, the mother, becomes a call girl in 1950s Soho. How a young Una finds herself living in a hippie squat haunted by vindictive ghosts in Kilburn in the early 1970s.
And, finally, how all that survives now of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una’s unspooling memories and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes stranger and more sinister.
Poguemahone is a wild, shape-shifting epic from one of modern Ireland's greatest writers. It is a wild free-verse monologue steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale Patrick McCabe has never attempted before.
‘If you’re looking for this century’s Ulysses, look no further … a stunningly lyrical novel’ Alex Preston, Observer
POGUEMAHONE
But, anyway,
where was I
yes, the pub up in London
The Bedford Arms
wasn’t I telling you
where, to my surprise,
on my recent journey
up Killiburn way
instead of Paddy Conway
who did I discover
standing there in behind
the counter
only this brand-new Nigerian barman
who you wouldn’t have
expected, in a million years.
to know the slightest little bit
about
cluricauns or
leprechauns
or anything to do
with the old tales and stories
of Currabawn,
or, for that matter, Ireland-
but, as I was soon to discover,
in fact, there was very little
that he didn’t know
about the subject
everything, indeed,
to do with them
making these precise little sketches
on a beermat with the sharpened point
of a pencil
as the pair of us
sat there
chatting away
this is what he looks
like, he said,
what would be
our equivalent in Nigeria.
‘There are those who would insist
Mr Exu is the devil’, he told me,
‘but that is not true, because mostly
he is a person like us. You will
see, for example, that he does not have
horns.
Indeed his principal symbol, his
one essential and necessary attribute
being the erect phallus
which is, of course, the sign of life
& constant vitality
that makes Exu the embodiment of
energy, of axe.’
With him sliding the
drawing across the counter
as he gave me a smile
& I had to laugh
when I saw this
particular detail that he’d
pencilled in
namely a great big loorpan of
an extended, anglewise prick
which looked so funny
set against the tall grinning
figure’s flaring swallowtail
coat.
Yes, Mr Exu!, he laughed,
that’s what they call
him in the little village I come from
in Africa
in the place where I was born,
that devious mythical trickster,
poet of melancholy,
weird user of words
watching them tumble wild in his head
as they take his fancy,
one minute there smiling
without so much as a care
in the world
& then the next thing you know
the world framed in the living
pearl of his eye
where you see yourself standing
looking back out at yourself
for he brings them free as any
bird of the air
every single story as ever there was
slipping with ease across
the frontiers of language
whether blackbird
or robin
perhaps even creatures that cannot be named
or seen
he is the one
who comes for us when its time
whether it be the thirties
or the forties
or the seventies
the one that in your culture
you tell me is called
the gruagach.
No, you genuinely
wouldn’t have expected
a twenty-four year old African barman
to know the first thing about
any of that
all that ancient old folklore stuff
the very same
as Auntie Nano used to love
to tell us all about
when we were small
the fairy Shee and
the magic of the hawthorn
yes, ghosts and all the rest of
that type of thing.
But that is exactly what he drew
the one and only Mr Exu.
& who, I have to say,
with that smashing great ponytail
& high-polished white loafers,
really did cut the most handsome
& dashing figure all told,
especially with that neat little
tranca
a twirly wee braid curling elegantly
backward
more commonly found, or so my
Nigerian friend informed me,
in the carved Yoruba images of Eshu.
But anyhow, back to London
and the old times and the way
that, in modern days, things
would appear to have gone.
It’s difficult to credit the extent to which
‘Auld Killiburn’, as they used to call it,
how it has transformed over the years.
With very few of the old-stagers in evidence now
&
the few that are in a sorry-looking state
exhibiting no end of strokes & limps
& the Lord knows what.
But I’m still very glad I took the trouble
to make the trip.
Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, is looking after his sister Una, now seventy and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate. From Dan’s anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family. How the parents are exiled from a small Irish village and end up living the hard immigrant life in England. How Dots, the mother, becomes a call girl in 1950s Soho. How a young Una finds herself living in a hippie squat haunted by vindictive ghosts in Kilburn in the early 1970s.
And, finally, how all that survives now of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una’s unspooling memories and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes stranger and more sinister.
Poguemahone is a wild, shape-shifting epic from one of modern Ireland's greatest writers. It is a wild free-verse monologue steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale Patrick McCabe has never attempted before.
‘If you’re looking for this century’s Ulysses, look no further … a stunningly lyrical novel’ Alex Preston, Observer
POGUEMAHONE
But, anyway,
where was I
yes, the pub up in London
The Bedford Arms
wasn’t I telling you
where, to my surprise,
on my recent journey
up Killiburn way
instead of Paddy Conway
who did I discover
standing there in behind
the counter
only this brand-new Nigerian barman
who you wouldn’t have
expected, in a million years.
to know the slightest little bit
about
cluricauns or
leprechauns
or anything to do
with the old tales and stories
of Currabawn,
or, for that matter, Ireland-
but, as I was soon to discover,
in fact, there was very little
that he didn’t know
about the subject
everything, indeed,
to do with them
making these precise little sketches
on a beermat with the sharpened point
of a pencil
as the pair of us
sat there
chatting away
this is what he looks
like, he said,
what would be
our equivalent in Nigeria.
‘There are those who would insist
Mr Exu is the devil’, he told me,
‘but that is not true, because mostly
he is a person like us. You will
see, for example, that he does not have
horns.
Indeed his principal symbol, his
one essential and necessary attribute
being the erect phallus
which is, of course, the sign of life
& constant vitality
that makes Exu the embodiment of
energy, of axe.’
With him sliding the
drawing across the counter
as he gave me a smile
& I had to laugh
when I saw this
particular detail that he’d
pencilled in
namely a great big loorpan of
an extended, anglewise prick
which looked so funny
set against the tall grinning
figure’s flaring swallowtail
coat.
Yes, Mr Exu!, he laughed,
that’s what they call
him in the little village I come from
in Africa
in the place where I was born,
that devious mythical trickster,
poet of melancholy,
weird user of words
watching them tumble wild in his head
as they take his fancy,
one minute there smiling
without so much as a care
in the world
& then the next thing you know
the world framed in the living
pearl of his eye
where you see yourself standing
looking back out at yourself
for he brings them free as any
bird of the air
every single story as ever there was
slipping with ease across
the frontiers of language
whether blackbird
or robin
perhaps even creatures that cannot be named
or seen
he is the one
who comes for us when its time
whether it be the thirties
or the forties
or the seventies
the one that in your culture
you tell me is called
the gruagach.
No, you genuinely
wouldn’t have expected
a twenty-four year old African barman
to know the first thing about
any of that
all that ancient old folklore stuff
the very same
as Auntie Nano used to love
to tell us all about
when we were small
the fairy Shee and
the magic of the hawthorn
yes, ghosts and all the rest of
that type of thing.
But that is exactly what he drew
the one and only Mr Exu.
& who, I have to say,
with that smashing great ponytail
& high-polished white loafers,
really did cut the most handsome
& dashing figure all told,
especially with that neat little
tranca
a twirly wee braid curling elegantly
backward
more commonly found, or so my
Nigerian friend informed me,
in the carved Yoruba images of Eshu.
But anyhow, back to London
and the old times and the way
that, in modern days, things
would appear to have gone.
It’s difficult to credit the extent to which
‘Auld Killiburn’, as they used to call it,
how it has transformed over the years.
With very few of the old-stagers in evidence now
&
the few that are in a sorry-looking state
exhibiting no end of strokes & limps
& the Lord knows what.
But I’m still very glad I took the trouble
to make the trip.
Pitched – deliriously – between high modernism and folk magic, between gorgeous free-verse and hilarious Irish vernacular, Poguemahone is a stunning achievement … profoundly affecting
