The Sorrow Garden Author:Thomas McCarthy When `The First Convention' won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award for 1977, Thomas McCarthy was recognized as a young poet with, in Eavan Boland's words, `an assured and unmistakable individual voice... The force of perception is everywhere.' The same critic wrote of one of the book's best poems, `State Funeral', that `its strength lies partly i... more »n convincing, unrhetorical public statement; but even more in the perceptions that underlie it. This is that rare and long-awaited advent in Irish poetry: a glimpse of de Valera's Ireland, through the eyes of a poet born into the officially-declared Irish Republic. Here is a scrutiny of the dream in the punishing light of the reality.' `The Sorrow Garden' continues to explore both private and public themes in poems which make their mark not by illusory flourishes but through the poet's mature and subtle control of his imaginative world.« less