Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at 22 Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s orderly home to find her own voice as a writer. As she chases obsessive love, damage and transcendence, her grandfather’s poetry seems to guide her home. Carmel knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry too well. In his poems to her, Phil envisions his daughter as a bright-eyed wren ascending in escape from his hand. But it is Phil who departs, abandoning his wife and two young daughters. Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet” with the father whose desertion scars her life, along with that of her fiercely dutiful sister and their gentle, cancer-ridden mother.
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