Thomas J. McGonigle — Dark Donegal and Other Poems

Thomas J. McGonigle carried Donegal with him from the Atlantic edge of Ireland to Pittsburgh steel mills and then to Los Angeles, where he worked for the Southern Pacific, the Whittier State School, and the city’s Board of Education. He wrote poems for banquets, friends, children, journeys, political arguments, and private grief, rarely imagining them as a book. After his death in a traffic accident in 1930, his children gathered every poem they could find into Dark Donegal and Other Poems. The result is sprawling, uneven, vivid, and deeply local: Ireland and California keep answering one another across exile. This complete reading edition preserves the family’s six-part arrangement, the acrostics and dedications, and the lineation of the original posthumous volume.