Places to Sleep

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.