The Place

About the Book

THE PLACE is where we are in the eternal here and now.

Sometimes the place we are in, and the place in us, seem separate and detached. William Brendan McPhillips is very much a person and poet of place.

Perhaps it was the frequent shift of scene, early on, that caught his attention and made the detail, the familiar and the new, the place, vital.

In the poetry of THE PLACE William Brendan McPhillips transcends his own place and delights an incredibly diverse audience around the world. His readers come of every age and culture, religion and nationality, finding as they do the universal human nature celebrated in the particularity of time and place.

Ballaghaderreen, a small town in County Roscommon on the borders of Sligo and Mayo, and the West of Ireland is one of those magical places where the seen and unseen touch, where the ancient echoes of the past draw us in, where the stones and stories of ancestors carry a sacred imprint into the present.

And all across Connacht, the mystical and mythical meet in stories of Ireland before and after the arrival of Saint Patrick, when Oisín, the poet and son of Finn MacCool, leader of the Fianna, dreamed of eternal youth and was tempted to abandon all he knew and loved for a dream, only to find, too late, that the human heart can never be at home in a dream, but only in the company of others. Oisín returns from Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth, to find himself an alien in a Christian world.

A Night In Connemara Light, is a fantasy set in its mystical hills, shoreline, islands and lore, as Connemara did trigger the imagination of the poet on a brief visit to his friend’s home, and a pilgrimage to Saint MacDara’s Island.

And then there is A Magical Port, Port Washington, on Long Island, where it took twenty five years for the poet to recognize that he had settled down even if he didn’t own a piece of the land. It was here that McPhillips married and where he and his wife raised their son, and where they came to develop so many friendships. On the Western shore of the peninsula, the hills and beaches, and the seasons fit the habit of mind he grew, across the street from the chestnuts and Beech on Church Street, long ago. Something of the old character and quality he knew in Connacht followed him here, and the distance between the here and now, and the then and there, the seen and the unseen, shrank again as poetry came to be.

McPhillips never owned land, and only once for a very short while did he ever live in a detached home. It was a small cottage when he first moved to Port, as the locals say. The locals of Ballaghaderreen also save breath referring to their home as Ballagh.

THE PLACE reveals the magic of the simple and ordinary moments in the rhythm and meter of traditional poetic language, words chosen wisely, and lines crafted to please the ear and compliment the heart beat. Sometimes deceptively simple poems touch the core because McPhillips deliberately, consciously reveres his poetic ancestors, as well as his genetic and cultural heritage.

William Brendan McPhillips identifies with the world, with its people, all of them, and so his poetry remembers the natural differences and universal ancestry of each and everyone of us. William Brendan McPhillips is at home in THE PLACE. And you will be too.

THE PLACE On A Magical Journey Home.

About the Author

“..born on the edge of the New World,” grown up “ .. on the edge of the old.” William Brendan McPhillips discovered poetry “..on a ship going the wrong way in a world collapsing in war.” He was changed utterly. Born in the Bronx, April 4th, 1937, he discovered in the mystical world of his ancestors in Ballaghaderreen, and the West of Ireland, that poetry was a language to bind the two worlds together, the seen and the unseen, the known and the, maybe, remembered. His poetry is a memorial art, the language of the soul in time and place. On A Magical Journey Home continues the movement from that long ago moment on the Atlantic ocean, across continents and cultures, time and place, and always arriving back into the eternal here and now. Following a “miraculous recovery” from near death, McPhillips continues his magical journey in his unique and magical verse.