An odyssey in search of an ancestor

The Poorhouse Field and Salt Yard Lane, Foley's Forge and Mill River Steps, Grey Stone Street and Treacy's Park

The Poorhouse Field and Salt Yard Lane, Foley's Forge and Mill River Steps, Grey Stone Street and Treacy's Park. The evocatively-named nooks and crannies of the ancient river town of Carrick-on-Suir, and their even more colourful inhabitants, are celebrated in the narrative poem All Souls by Michael Coady.

He has used the same title for his new book, launched in the Co Tipperary town last week, which mingles history and verse, local lore and a strange personal odyssey in search of traces of the life and death of a great-grandfather who emigrated to America and made no contact with home for 30 years.

In his poems, essays and personal memoirs he imparts the flavour and flux of the small town where he has lived all his life and where he has worked as a teacher, musician and writer.

As the cover note says, he deals with "the interlocking and overlapping territories of people and place, time and memory."

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The names and occupations of the townspeople who are immortalised in All Souls are, in themselves, a vivid litany that commemorates Carrick life in an earlier era - Ally Mahony, the gingerbread woman, Tadhg Driscoll, the salt maker, Mickel Magrath, the shovel maker, Tom Stevenson, the stocking weaver, John Dorney, the horse breaker, and many more.

His family narrative, The Use of Memory, is an absorbing personal detective story in which he gradually traces and uncovers - in Carrick and in America - something of the life and death of a lost great-grandfather. James Coady, born in 1848, was a boatman, first of the Suir and later of the Delaware.

He had left Ireland after his wife had died in childbirth. Behind him he left his only son Michael in the care of the child's grandfather. The boy was never to see his father again.

In search of some explanation of this deep trauma that affected his own grandfather, the trail began for the present-day Michael Coady in his local St Nicholas parish church sacristy, where the parish registers are kept that survive since 1784.

It led on to Philadelphia, with the help of American friends searching street directories, census records, newspapers, indexes of births, marriages and deaths.

Then, with the leads gradually pointing more precisely towards certain streets and parishes in Philadelphia, the author himself embarks on a journey of exploration which unfolds, partly as travelogue, partly as history, and overall as an insight into the realities of 19th-century Irish immigrant life in the US.

Michael Coady has won Listowel Writers' Week prizes and the Francis MacManus Short Story Award, and received the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1979.

His new book is published by The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co Meath, in hardback (£13.95) and paperback (£7.95).