The poet—died on January 6, 2012 in Dublin, Ireland, accompanied by the words of James Joyce. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. An obituary in The Guardian, written by his son, notes he died on the same day (Epiphany) that James Joyce’s story “The Dead” takes place. They shared a love of the story, “sadly one of the few things we had in common.” An insurance salesman before he made a living as a writer, he was one of seven children, and had seven children as well: CM, Norbert, Lucy, Gregory, Bernard, Michael, and Christopher. He often spoke of his mother’s singing. She sang all day “except during mealtimes,” and she “sung him awake.” His mother, an Irish nationalist. His father, pro-British. Mother was queen and father died early. He wrote Love in the Afternoon, poems on love and war. A poet’s job, he thought, is to act as catalyst, not oracle. Catalyst: a person or thing that precipitates an event. He did not like Seamus Heaney, and did not care for Yeats. Spent four years of “voluntary exile” in America, but then his American teaching appointments dried up. Born on June 23, 1923, in Dublin. How fitting to die, then, in January. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland…upon all the living and the dead.
-Morgan English