IN TIME AND LOVE

About the Book

IN TIME AND LOVE brings together the heart and the mind, the conscience and the flesh, the blood and bone of authentic human nature at home in the world.

William Brendan McPhillips continues On A Magical Journey Home embracing his own nature, and insisting on the integrity and integration of the human family.

McPhillips broke his own silence, but never broke his bond, his covenant, believing, as he does, with John Donne, “ No man is an island, entire of itself, ....every man is ... a part of the main.”.

It was poetry that delighted and eventually freed William Brendan McPhillips from the tyranny of fear. It was poetry that gave him back the voice of his soul.

In THE PLACE On A Magical Journey Home, Book One, McPhillips celebrates the living space of childhood, memory, fantasy and daily living.

In THE SOUL On A Magical Journey Home, Book Two, McPhillips celebrates religion and art the twin shapers of human consciousness. In religion and art, McPhillips wrested his voice from those who would have the comfort of lies, and of denigration.

For many years, McPhillips carried in his wallet three quotations. The first and oldest was from the Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore. A poem called The Bird with this line, “Bird, O my bird, listen to me, do not close your wings.”

The second is from the Hungarian poet, Jaroslav Seifert, quoted at his funeral in Budapest in January 1986. “If an ordinary person is silent about the truth, it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying.”

And the third, sent to him by a friend, is from the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.  “O tell us, poet, what do you do? --- I praise. / But those dark, deadly, devastating ways, / how do you bear them, suffer them? --- I praise.”

IN TIME AND LOVE remembers the poet’s voice is shaped in the real world, the history and heritage of humanity, the joy and the anguish of each human passage, and like Tagore’s bird, Seifert’s conscience and Rilke’s enchantment, each poet must choose the one or many songs to sing.

THE PLACE, THE SOUL, and here IN TIME AND LOVE, William Brendan McPhillips remembers his own struggle, and the unfinished challenge of time, but always remembering the poet Keats’s call to beauty and truth.

IN TIME AND LOVE remains true to its ancestral inspiration, and to the labor of love.

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.