Throw this one to the bottom, ya little clone-bones and discover the meaning of an Irish Rebellion!!!

Michael Donaghy

Gifted practitioner of poetry and Irish traditional music.

A figure in the generation of poets who emerged in the 1980s, as well as an Irish traditional musician of repute.
Donaghy was born into an Irish family but did not follow their traditions. In 1985, he moved to London to join his partner and fellow musician Maddy Paxman, whom he married in 2003.

He also continued to play in various Irish music groups, as well as the early line-up of Lammas,

His gift for dramatic immediacy, and his crossing of mandarin and vernacular language, enabled his work to avoid the academicism that sometimes afflicts the recent generation of American so-called new formalists, with whom he was never truly aligned.

A beguiling playfulness serves to emphasise the depths of anxiety and melancholia over which Donaghy's superb ear leads us - feelings perhaps rooted in Catholicism. He retains the Catholic sense of scale and labyrinthine ingenuity; in City Of God, a mad, failed priest, obsessed with the medieval memory arts, believes "the mind inside the cathedral inside the mind/ could find the secret order of the world/ and remember every drop on every face/ in every summer thunderstorm."

Later, in the shocking Black Ice And Rain, from Conjure, even the consolations of such an imagined order are removed, as the narrator pitilessly passes on his dreadful tale of friendship and catastrophe to an unsuspecting party guest.

The birth, in 1996, of their son Ruairi was a great joy to Maddy and Michael. Michael was a devoted father,

A particular highlight was his rendering of Keats's Ode To Melancholy ("No, no, go not to Lethe"), which threw a bridge across the division between poetry on the page and in performance, without sacrificing an iota of seriousness. Poetry in recent times has had few finer advocates or practitioners. He will come to be seen as one of the representative poets of the age.