John Mee Poetry

John Mee's debut collection, The Blue in the Blue Marble, won the Straid Collection Award 2023 and was published by Templar Poetry in May 2024. It can be purchased here, where you can also listen to six poems from the collection and watch videos accompanying four other poems.

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John Mee won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2015. In 2016, he won first prize in the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition.

His chapbook, From the Extinct, was published in February 2017 by Southword Editions. It is available to buy here. ‘[T]here is more range in From the Extinct than in many full collections’: Sabotage Reviews.

 

His poems have appeared in The Rialto, Magma, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Bad Lilies, Prelude (New York), The Friday Poem, Southword, Propel, The SHOp, Poetry on the Buses (London), Cyphers, The Irish Examiner, Coast to Coast to Coast, Howl, The Quarryman, The Honest Ulsterman, The Cork Literary Review, and in various anthologies. He is a professor in the Law School at University College Cork.

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This is Martina Evans' review of The Blue in the Blue Marble in the Irish Times (19 October 2024):

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The title of John Mee’s collection – The Blue in the Blue Marble (Templar, €14) – reflects the human eye that is the heartbreaking, funny centre of My Father, Your Father, a long poem about ageing and how “the light” eventually runs out. “The ophthalmologist had the look of my father . . . behind glasses / the hint of challenge in his eyes. / You’re getting old, he laughed. / People fool themselves, keeping words at a distance,/trying for better light.”//With my chin on the strap, looking into the light, I thought of my father . . . a shorter distance/from the TV, holding one of those old magnifying glasses”.

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When Mee’s mother laughs, his father’s “eyes / flashed at her, You’re using up all the light!” Mee, in the Long Valley “for a couple of glasses” waiting for drops to dilate his pupils, remembers “Finished with glasses, seeing into the distance, my dying father laughed, huge black eyes taking in the last of the light.” Towards the end, Mee’s touch is as lightly precise as an ophthalmic instrument – “There was nowhere /in Kuala Lumpur airport to cry.” – pinning down exactly the difficulty of finding space to grieve in this modern world.

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The Law of Bees is a witty, exacting response to the Brehon Laws, “in law’s strict speech / they graze like cows, goats, sheep / their trespass can’t be a stampede. / nor a leaping nor a fording.” Experiments & Observations on the Singing of Birds, which is adapted from an 18th-century manuscript of that name, shows a deep identification with the animal world. This empathy reaches its irreverent zenith in the ludic Zoonoses. Zoonoses “are what we catch /from the animals/when we lean too close/breathe in”, Mee declares before exchanging places with his cat in a delightful anthropological move reminiscent of the great Cork poet Seán Ó Riordáin, although the voice is all Mee. “As Pooka powers up //my laptop / to check the Guardian, // I’m out in the garden, pissing on a tree.”