CORK ONE CITY ONE BOOK 2024
In Once was a Boy, his vivid new collection, Theo Dorgan reaches deep into his Cork childhood to examine, among other things, the wellsprings of what would become a life in poetry. At times with the forensic detachment of adult distance, at other times given over to reliving a child’s conscious attention to his own life, these poems explore a past where everything is new in the living moment and yet, somehow, “everything will go on forever”.
If the family is where we learn to understand feelings and affections, school is the hard place where we meet the powers of the world, where we encounter and learn to deal with both the liberating and the oppressive powers of language. School, as the growing boy experiences it, is the place where we learn either to surrender or to stand free in the world, and freedom comes with embracing, understanding, the weight and responsibility of choosing your words, of speaking for yourself.
Poet Theo Dorgan’s beloved native city is a ghostly, sustaining, presence throughout — city familiar and mysterious, cradle of possibilities the young boy dreams of, gazing longingly through the classroom window. In that place, in those days, Dorgan made certain promises to himself. Once Was a Boy asks if those promises were kept.
This collection shows how tenderness between men can grow in the fissures of rule and regulation, and the book stands as a rich, warm, and vital portrait of boys and men struggling with ill-fitting forms of being masculine, with its poetic forms matching experience with exact precision. Yet no poem conforms exactly to inherited classical forms, reflecting how for the boy-poet ‘the words are / awkward, shaping themselves in my head’, and demonstrating the creative reshaping of the world by the adult poet. Once Was a Boy is a perfectly paced and pitched resolution of that earlier emotional and formal distance.
—Moynagh Sullivan in Poetry Ireland Review
Once Was a Boy
Theo Dorgan
13 November 2023
82 pp. 140 x 216 mm
ISBN 9781915629135 paperback, €12.50
Cover image by Gaetano Tranchino, by kind permission of the artist. www.gaetanotranchino.com
See also www.theodorgan.com/
