The poems gathered here re-assemble late 1970s Barcelona as a parallel city of the imagination. There are visits to other Spanish cities, a memory of a brief walk through Murcia some forty years ago, and more recent poems deriving from stays in Madrid, La Coru am and Bilbao. Kehoe's short lyrics are redolent of hopeful motorways, of entries and exits, of crossings and re-crossings. They sing of the exhalations and exhaustions of the streets and of the vast cities of Spain. Ultimately, the Barcelona of the seventies - an untrammeled, bold-spirited place, that knew few tourists between October and May - continues to inform the work of the poet. Patrick Kehoe writes for RTE Entertainment and Culture in Ireland.
