Father Myself by James McDermott

In 2022, James McDermott lost his sixty-year-old father to COVID after three weeks in intensive care. In* Father Myself*, his second collection from Nine Arches Press, McDermott explores his father’s complex illness and death; grief; growth and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, he had to learn to father himself. In clear-sighted and often hard-hitting poems, McDermott takes the reader onto the frontline of the pandemic – documenting the experience and trauma of a COVID-bereaved family with an unflinching eye.

Both powerful and compassionate, these extraordinary poems have the capacity to go beyond simply a record of events, reaching sensitively for the human details that matter – the beat of a heart and movement of breath, the touch of a hand, the words we use for goodbye.