About Crash Centre

With unusual, memoir-like power, Crash Centre explores what happens when grooming, gaslighting and abuse masquerade as trust in the relationship between the author and a charismatic literary monk—an antagonist who unites the more toxic legacies of the Catholic Church and Northern-Irish Republicanism. Set at an elite boarding school in the early 1990s, this powerful, affecting work addresses questions of mentorship and betrayal, trauma, memory and erasure, as well as pathways to recovery. Employing impactful, direct address at key moments, the poems also use fairytale imagery and resonant poetic closure. Where Crash Centre begins as self-witness, to reclaim a younger self from silence, by the end it breaks through to a lost community, speaking to, and for, others.  The middle section of Waiting for Saint Brendan, “Digesting a Scorpion,” addresses experiences of disassociation and silencing resulting from clerical sexual abuse—and exhorts us to “hold the line” against erasure. Crash Centre continues and extends that concern.

Praise

“Each poem feels like a shard of broken glass, sharp, reflective, impossible to ignore… A remarkable book, it’s a harrowing book, a book about abuse, a searing poetic narrative, a courageous book. McLoghlin goes head on into these experiences in a way that’s quite fresh. The poetry is beautiful, it’s mythological, there’s fairy tale elements, it’s fascinating.”

Peter Sirr and Adam Wyley in conversation on the Books for Breakfast Podcast, where Crash Centre was chosen as a Book of the Year for 2024.  (Listen at the 10:20 mark.) 

“David McLoghlin’s Crash Centre is driven to recount a traumatic personal past and, in so doing, speaks for a traumatised society. …The confessional narratives ground themselves in a fairy-tale expression… as the physical world mimes back a powerful objective correlative.. McLoghlin’s memory is as painfully personal… as it is aware of all the unknowable suffering others who can read this book and know they’re not alone.” Martina Evans, The Irish Times, Saturday 19th October, 2024

“Here in his new collection, McLoghlin, with his complex education, emotional maturity and worldliness, creates a powerful and sublimely effective construct in art. …This is not merely passive suffering; this is suffering mediated through the near divine grace of rigorous thought. The sheer force of McLoghlin’s language, his imagination’s radically steep incline in the face of awful experience, is what makes his poetry exceptional and redemptive. …The quality of the writing in these poems is marvellous: the density of ‘Hostage Walk’ and ‘Brucellosis’, the severe descriptive discipline of ‘Three Person Sword’ or ‘Bones’ Evidence’; and the use of irony, its sinister power… Switches of key, quick changes of emotional register, is a huge part of McLoghlin’s aesthetic. …This is a poetry powering forward without a gum shield, vulnerable and alert, and almost all-knowing. ‘An army of little men will spring out of the ground,’ he writes in the poem ‘Helpers’; and in this new collection McLoghlin has created a work unquestionably triumphant with poetic victories." Thomas McCarthy, The Irish Catholic, 5th December, 2024

“Crash Centre is one of the most important book of poetry published in Ireland this year."

Patrick Cotter, author of Sonic White Poise (Dedalus Press) and Making Music (Three Spires Press).

“Words like “unflinching” and “courageous” are overused when describing art but they certainly apply to David McLoghlin’s third collection. …As we turn the pages, Narziss emerges as a sort of Grendel in a priest’s frock, returning again and again to devour a different vision of the poet. But, like all monsters, he must meet his Beowulf. …Right across this collection McLoghlin reveals himself to be a master conductor of our emotions, keeping us by turns heartbroken, enraged, entranced. …these are fine poems and well worth the journey. The poems, and the man, are to be saluted.” Seán Kelly in The Examiner, 12th October, 2024

“In David McLoghlin’s work, Ireland encounters a new poetry: a male poet willing to write his body, willing to record what has been done to it. In Crash Centre, McLoghlin has braced himself for impact, for a deep dive into the very site of his abuse. The safety of metaphor is gone, replaced by the closeness of simile; there is no distance now—the reality of his bodily experience absolutely, microscopically captured. We feel a moral duty to re-trace this journey downwards alongside the poet, to see what he sees, has seen, can barely bring himself to see again. These are parts and places previously untraveled—terrain few male poets have dared to map. Hinted at in the work of some, perhaps, in John Montague’s “warm tracks” radiating across that “white expanse” of his lover’s body. But here is work that goes deeper, layers deep… shifting the power dynamics of sex in brave, compassionate and unflinching ways. David McLoghlin is a male poet brave enough to write the truth of his body and what has been done to it. He is aware of what this signifies—the dawn of a new tradition for male poets, a determined blooming out from what has come before, an expansion across new ground.” Jennifer Horgan, Author and Journalist

“This melding of past and present in the experience of the abuse survivor is one of the themes broached by poet David McLoghlin in a superb new collection, Crash Centre, published by Salmon Poetry. McLoghlin was groomed and abused at a private boarding school in the early 1990s. His way of seeking accountability for that has been to write about it — a one-man, artistic version of an inquiry. In a poem called ‘Kamchatka’, he captures the redemptive power of this truth-telling.

“I vacated Ireland when he touched me”, he writes. McLoghlin left Ireland shortly after college, but has since returned, with his wife and daughter. The poem continues: “From the Skellig to the Causeway, / I want my country again. / I want the sentinel places to wake: / Mizen, Erris, Bloody Foreland, Carnsore.”

The scoping report is (yet again), a call for us all to wake up and bear witness. The pillars of Irish society — government, the media, the law, the schools — are called on to be the “sentinel places”.

If we can achieve this, McLoghlin suggests, there is hope for us and for our country. The poem ends: “We’ll sit in the Wishing Chair, spines against basalt, and start to reimagine.” Colin Murphy, The Irish Independent, 8th September, 2024

“As an avid reader of Irish literature, I found David McLoghlin’s work to be fresh and unexpected, yet still worthy of inclusion in the great canon of poetry that is produced by his nation.” —Mark Shaw, Natural Bridge journal

“In a number of breathlessly long sentences, this poem locates within the drama of Antarctic adventure an Irish singer-adventurer who sings the old way, that is, alone. The diction here is as rough as the unfor- giving icy environment, and the physical exertion of singing plus the power of his song adds up to its own heroic achievement.”

—Billy Collins, judge’s citation on the poem “Tom Crean sings sean-nós at the Tiller on the southern Ocean” (included in Crash Centre), prize-winning finalist in the 2015/2016 Ballymaloe international Poetry Prize

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(*"And catch the heart off guard and blow it open." 'Postscript' by Seamus Heaney, in The Spirit Level (Faber and Faber London, 1996). Listen to him read it here.)