Written in the wake of Irelands 2008 economic collapse, Thomas McCarthys Pandemonium moves between lament and protest in search of a meaningful response in language. Many of the poems were written during a period of retreat along Irelands south-west coast, a landscape that imbues McCarthys politics with geological intensity. The Atlantic horizon where the sun lies down in the west to die is mirrored inland by corruption and rot, a modern Ireland beset, in the poets eyes, by financial and moral pandemonium. McCarthys subtle satiric wit and understated lyricism preserve raw outrage as historical document. His poems register the moral ire of many during a pivotal era of Irish history, leading with the poets only weapon, the word the ink trail that pain makes on the page
