****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Patrick Deeley was born in 1953 and grew up in the tiny township of Foxhall, Co Mayo in West Ireland. He was the eldest son of Laurence (Larry) Deeley, who was a farmer as well as the village's timber man, sawyer, carpenter and master hurley maker. Patrick's book, "The Hurley Maker's Son", is an autobiographical memoir which provides a nostalgic look back to the times of his youth and which today seem so very distant. In many ways, the book is a paean to simpler ways and to the better sense of values that people had back then but one which avoids becoming maudlin or sentimental about the hardships that everyone routinely had to endure.The book is also a complex journey of catharsis for the author: growing up as something of a rebellious dreamer, more interested in the workings and ways of nature than of machines and with a greater aptitude for book-learning than tool-wielding, he seems to have spent much of his life regarding himself as a frequent disappointment to his father. Circumstances would also seem to have conspired to delay his working out of the issues, judging from the emotional charge that the book carries throughout.As one would expect from a successful poet, Patrick Deeley writes with a deft lyricism and a turn of phrase that invariably conveys a great amount within an extremely economical expenditure of words. We see this not only in the polished and skilfully honed prose but also in the masterfully constructed narrative flow, which whilst appearing almost aimless in its meandering from vignette to vignette, unburdened by the strictures of chaptered form, nevertheless leads the reader through its myriad of connected cameos and seemingly casual musings every bit as inexorably as any river flows to the sea.The author also writes with great humility and, one senses, honesty, as well as with a great deal of characteristic soft Irish wit and witticism. The book is an excellent read, every bit as gripping as a novel, whilst also revealing something of truth in the world that it appears that only poets can see.Highly recommended.
