Michael Coady obituary: A poet profoundly at ease in the world

Born May 26th, 1939

Died March 25th, 2024

The poet Michael Coady, from Carrick-on-Suir, lived a long and fruitful life, hermetically sealed by his devotion to family and by a sure confidence that he had created a body of Tipperary literature as fabulous and settled as Charles Kickham’s Knocknagow.

In collections of poetry such as All Souls (1997) and Going By Water (2009), he captured essences of Tipperary life that were not just rural, but urban and industrial. He admired the weaver and the industrial furnace as much as the agricultural shovel and rake. He was curious about every aspect of vocational life, including the history of trade unions and the social conditions of his native Carrick. He wrote as a poet at ease in this world, sure of its language and its society and absolutely confident of an audience.

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Son of a musical mother – the Doreen of Doreen Power’s Danceband that played to huge crowds in 1930s Waterford – and a musician father, he was also sure of his music. The Déise songs of An Rinn, the playing of Pakie and Micho Russell, the ballad-singing of his beloved Clancy Brothers, all created a rich personal inheritance. He called himself “a lapsed trombonist” and collaborated with composers such as Marion Ingoldsby, Rhona Clarke and Bill Whelan, whose setting of Coady’s poem A State of Light was first performed by the Kaleidoscope Quartet with soprano Deirdre Moynihan at the Clifden Arts Festival in 2013.

Michael Coady was born in Carrick-on-Suir in 1939. He was educated at the CBS and at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, as well as at UCC and the University of Galway. He returned to Carrick, where he became a schoolteacher.

His first poem was published in the legendary New Irish Writing page of the Irish Press and he subsequently won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1979. The Gallery Press published his first collection of poems, Two for a Woman, Three for a Man, in 1979 and Gallery became his exclusive poetry publisher for the rest of his life. Five magnificent collections followed that first success: Oven Lane (1987, revised edition 2014), All Souls (1997), One Another (2003), Going by Water (2009) and Given Light (2017). He won the O’Shaughnessy Award in 1979 and the Francis McManus Prize for his fiction in 1987 and 1993. In the 1990s he received a number of crucial Arts Council bursaries that allowed him to travel on a voyage of family exploration to Newfoundland and the United States. These journeys led to the most important publication of his life, All Souls. In 2005 he held the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University and he also held a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. In 1998 he was elected to membership of Aosdána.

[ Tipperary poet Michael Coady dies aged 84 ]

Coady’s subject matter was local and historical. His poetic language was traditional and yet adventurous and demanding. He was a born narrator. He admired poets and dramatists who mined the seams of social history beneath their own feet; writers such as Waterford dramatist Jim Nolan and poets John Ennis and Seán Dunne. He was rooted and happy in Carrick, yet he roamed constantly and widely in Irish and Irish-American literary circles. A charming man and wonderful listener, he was repeatedly invited to literary festivals at Listowel, Clifden and Galway. He approached people with a great openness of heart and his was a calming hand in any tragedy. His sense of belonging was there from the beginning; in the early poem Two for a Woman, Three for a Man he wrote: “When the bell boomed three/ over my father’s coffin/ my emigrant brother pale/ above his black tie shuddered/ I couldn’t live/ Under that sound.// I could have said that though/ There are other places/ There are other bells ...”

He understood that human life is universal wherever it is lived; a philosophy that he explained brilliantly in the RTÉ television documentary I Live Here, broadcast in 1986. This task of honouring the local was never so urgently or so comprehensively announced than in his magnificent collection All Souls, a book that should be read by every reader of poetry. In All Souls he created the complete map of his poetic being-in-the-world, from his grandfather’s Oven Lane to the planting of a tree in Philadelphia, a River Birch, in memory of the boatmen of the Suir and the Delaware. In poems, prose and photographs, he traces a personal journey across time, from a 1927 printed programme of the Old Met, a programme from a performance of La Forza Del Destino that his father sent to his grandfather, to a 1990s encounter at JFK: “among the milling cosmopolitan multitudes at Kennedy Airport we are amazed to run into Carrick friends who happen to be travelling on the same flight to Ireland: Tom and Pearl Nealon returning from a holiday, Paddy and Bobby Clancy on their way home from a singing tour. At the crossroads of the world the old local saying is dusted off and traded as conscious cliché: wherever you go you’re sure to meet a Carrickman.”

This truth was at the core of Michael Coady’s abiding strength as a poet.

He is survived by his wife, Martina, the much loved and constantly invoked companion of his poetry; by his children, Niamh, Lucy and James; and by his grandchildren, Patrick, Clementine, Annie Mai, Elizabeth and Cion.