Poems for the Lockdown - the changing face of Galway

Mon, Jun 01, 2020

THIS POEM was written in 2002 and features in my first collection of poems, The Boy With No Face, published by Salmon in 2005.

It is about the strange experience of coming back to Galway from London in 1994 and finding the place, which had been, for me, a relatively dull place to grow up during the 1970s and 1980s transformed into the happening and groovy place it became in the 1990s.

Two local pubs are referenced here - PM Kelehan’s, which was opposite the hospital, and Garavan’s on Shop Street. The somewhat rude last line I owe to Nicholas who was the barman in Garavan’s for what seemed like several centuries.