Author(s): Paul Magee

Poetry

The title poem in Stone Postcard is a passionate drama that thinks through the close kinship of solace and trauma, something neither private nor public, and always waiting. The book as a whole moves with that spacious idea. The focus is intense, as you might expect. The tone, at the same time, is often laconic.There are two Parts. The first, starting with a birth and fractured family, has an intimate scope; the second carries questions of belonging out to wider horizons. Paul Magee's variety takes in a policeman embracing an exploding man in Iraq, the international committee that met to recalibrate the metre in 1983, a keyhole view, a toddler at the beach, visits to an office of Employment Plus, and to New Jersey. Virgil's detailed, horrific account of war's chaos in the siege of Latium unfolds a nine-page climax to the book.