Featured Publication – Some of These Stories are True by Maurice Devitt

Our featured publication for September and October is Some of These Stories are True by Maurice Devitt, published by Doire Press.

‘Maurice Devitt is a unique voice in contemporary Irish poetry. In Some of These Stories are True he continues to tantalise us with poems brimming with playfulness, imagination and beauty. These poems are lifted from life – often slant versions of lives – and are fuelled by a poetic perception that is wise and uncanny. These lines from ‘Cherry Blossom’ encapsulate the essence of his oeuvre: ‘…the joy of life is often to be found / in the comfort of repetition, reassurance of the mundane, / and just the occasional instance of perfection.’ Brian Kirk

‘Maurice Devitt’s second collection Some of These Stories are True contains many worlds, including a rich inner world, the world of work, the world of innocence, childhood and the past. He depicts an older Ireland with an almost hermetic quality in his poem ‘Antimacassar’, with descriptions of flocked wallpaper and powdery silence. As he says in his poem ‘Dippy Eggs’ (and who of a certain age doesn’t remember them?): ‘For everything there is a perfect point of lift-off / Missed, and the chance is gone.’
And lift-off is what these poems do – often philosophical, sometimes playful – the narrative voice offers us a view of the familiar and everyday in a new light, containing nuggets of wit and wisdom.’ Jean O’Brien

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Born in Dublin, Maurice Devitt completed an MA in Poetry Studies at Mater Dei following a 30-year career in Insurance & Banking. His debut collection ‘Growing Up in Colour’ was published by Doire Press in 2018. His poems have featured in a significant number of journals, both in Ireland and internationally, and been nominated for Pushcart, Forward and Best of the Net prizes. He is a past winner of the Trócaire/Poetry Ireland, Poems for Patience and Bangor Poetry Competitions, and has been placed or shortlisted in many others, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Listowel Collection Competition and Cúirt New Writing Award. Maurice is the chairperson of The Hibernian Writers’ Group, and his Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology of the group’s work published by Alba Publishing in 2015. He is curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies Facebook page where he posts featured poems, news and poetry articles on a daily basis.

Copies of Some of These Stories are True can be purchased for the Doire Press website.