FATHER MYSELF (SIGNED)

A signed copy of 'Father Myself', James McDermott's second poetry collection, published by Nine Arches Press.

If you would like a personalised inscription in the book, please specify what you'd like written in the 'notes/instructions' section of the order form.

Please note orders can only be shipped within the UK.

In 2022, James McDermott lost his sixty-year-old father to COVID after three weeks in intensive care. In Father Myself, his second collection from Nine Arches Press, McDermott explores his father’s complex illness and death; grief; growth and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, he had to learn to father himself.

In clear-sighted and often hard-hitting poems, McDermott takes the reader onto the frontline of the pandemic – documenting the experience and trauma of a COVID-bereaved family with an unflinching eye. Both powerful and compassionate, these extraordinary poems have the capacity to go beyond simply a record of events, reaching sensitively for the human details that matter – the beat of a heart and movement of breath, the touch of a hand, the words we use for goodbye.

“Father Myself is a bright devastation of a book, a meditation on father-son love, queerness, loss, imperfection, and a man slowly becoming his own father. Lyrical, haunting and exquisitely rendered.” Joelle Taylor

“This is emotional, gut-punching stuff. McDermott's best work to date.” Luke Wright

“James McDermott lays bare the language of grief in this deeply moving, startlingly authentic collection. Beautifully drawn vignettes of anguish and loss usher the reader from hospital to home, domesticity to deathbed. An examination of the human condition, settings and snippets of dialogue are precise, compelling, often forensic, with imagery of flesh and decay a recurring motif: ‘I see him / in rotten apples liver pâté red steak’. Yet tenderness surfaces again and again like a soft bruise: ‘Dad’s pierced left ear lobe / I touched for the first and last time in the chapel of rest’. Ultimately courage prevails, along with hope for a kind of rebirth: ‘who will I be brave enough to be now / I don’t need your approval’. A memorable read - powerful and affecting” Ian Humphreys

“A brave and self-exposing collection of poems that’s a moving homage to a parent that died too soon, as well as to the love and complexities of a father-son relationship. An honest and probing exploration of coping in the days before and after death that brims with the day-to-day reality of people and place, embracing dialogue and speech, and capturing the private vocabulary of a family. Poems with immediacy and dramatic flair, surprising imagery, and a delicate humour imbued with grief. The book is an incredible testament to the pandemic in which McDermott hangs his father out to die, one where boy becomes man, and where loss brings catharsis and resurrection, but also enables a celebration and affirmation of the queer self. An intelligent, compelling and heartbreaking collection that’s an elegy to covid and to everything that through all the years could never be said” Paul Stephenson