CRASH CENTRE

DAVID MCLOGHLIN

Available for Purchase

About cRASH ceNTRE

With unusual, memoir-like power, Crash Centre explores what happens when grooming, gaslighting and abuse masquerade as trust in the relationship between the author and a charismatic literary monk—an antagonist who unites the more toxic legacies of the Catholic Church and Northern-Irish Republicanism. Set at an elite boarding school in the early 1990s, this powerful, affecting work addresses questions of mentorship and betrayal, trauma, memory and erasure, as well as pathways to recovery. Employing impactful, direct address at key moments, the poems also use fairytale imagery and resonant poetic closure. Where Crash Centre begins as self-witness, to reclaim a younger self from silence, by the end it breaks through to a lost community, speaking to, and for, others.  The middle section of Waiting for Saint Brendan, “Digesting a Scorpion,” addresses experiences of disassociation and silencing resulting from clerical sexual abuse—and exhorts us to “hold the line” against erasure. Crash Centre continues and extends that concern.

pRAISE

In David McLoghlin’s work, Ireland encounters a new poetry: a male poet willing to write his body, willing to record what has been done to it. In Crash Centre, McLoghlin has braced himself for impact, for a deep dive into the very site of his abuse. The safety of metaphor is gone, replaced by the closeness of simile; there is no distance now—the reality of his bodily experience absolutely, microscopically captured. We feel a moral duty to re-trace this journey downwards alongside the poet, to see what he sees, has seen, can barely bring himself to see again. These are parts and places previously untraveled—terrain few male poets have dared to map. Hinted at in the work of some, perhaps, in John Montague’s “warm tracks” radiating across that “white expanse” of his lover’s body. But here is work that goes deeper, layers deep… shifting the power dynamics of sex in brave, compassionate and unflinching ways. David McLoghlin is a male poet brave enough to write the truth of his body and what has been done to it. He is aware of what this signifies—the dawn of a new tradition for male poets, a determined blooming out from what has come before, an expansion across new ground.

—Jennifer Horgan, Author and Journalist

“As an avid reader of Irish literature, I found David McLoghlin’s work to be fresh and unexpected, yet still worthy of inclusion in the great canon of poetry that is produced by his nation”

—Mark Shaw, Natural Bridge journal

In a number of breathlessly long sentences, this poem locates within the drama of Antarctic adventure an Irish singer-adventurer who sings the old way, that is, alone. The diction here is as rough as the unfor- giving icy environment, and the physical exertion of singing plus the power of his song adds up to its own heroic achievement.

—Billy Collins, judge’s citation on the poem “Tom Crean sings sean-nós at the Tiller on the southern Ocean” (included in Crash Centre), prize-winning finalist in the 2015/2016 Ballymaloe international Poetry Prize

 My Newsletter, Hedgeschool

Sign up below for my newsletter, Hedge School, each instalment of which includes a poem to blow the heart—and the mind—open.* Each newsletter will also contain a short background about the specific author, and resources for further exploration. There is a wealth of sustenance through poetry out there, and my goal is to help you to find it.

Stay in touch, and receive this inspiring content that is available nowhere else.

Click here for the background of the term Hedge School. 

(*"And catch the heart off guard and blow it open." 'Postscript' by Seamus Heaney, in The Spirit Level (Faber and Faber London, 1996). Listen to him read it here.)