Healy - The Travels of Sorrow

John McAuliffe, The Irish Times Healy was renowned as a novelist, memoirist, and playwright as well as a poet, and I think its fair to say that there was a touch of poetry in everything he wrote and, furthermore, that Healy was a poet at heart Healy is a man who hears the whispering of shells, who finds silence in the mirror, who sees into the depth of things. His worldview is often perfectly humane and yet slightly askance disconcerting, even The Travels of Sorrow generally gravitates around themes of ageing and death and their attendant profundities and absurdities. Theres also a great sense of kinship, of the importance of friendship and indeed of the bond that exists between humanity and nature. A number of the poems are elegies, hinting at vital words that were simply never said an especially poignant subtext in a posthumous collection I believe that Healy is a very fine poet indeed maybe even one of Irelands greatest writers of recent times. Whether bringing to life birdsong or silence (Love, silence is the hardest song to sing), presences or absences personified moons or skeletons of trees, healy is a poet of the visceral and the ineffable, both With The Travels of Sorrow, Healy packs so much life and death into his work that the reader feels mentally and emotionally enlarged for the reading of it. In a just world, this collection would be celebrated as a final gift from an enormously talented and underrated mind.

For all its elegiac melancholy, The Travels of Sorrow is strangely uplifting; its morbidity is tempered by vitality. Kevin McNeil, Poetry Ireland Review Gallery Books Editor Peter Fallon THE TRAVELS OF SORROW