Lives of the Saints Author: Mícheál McCann ISBN-13: 978 1 91737 122 3Publisher: Gallery Guideline Price: €12.95Following on from his debut, Devotion (Gallery, 2024), the centrepiece of which was a queering of the 18th century Irish poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, Derry poet Mícheál McCann’s second collection, Lives of the Saints, dives deeper into both religious and historical themes. This is a collection that grapples, earnestly, with the sort of theological questions perhaps unfashionable in contemporary poetry, though in its lively framing and warm tone it is neither a fusty book nor a book that requires a grounding in Christianity to read. Replete with abbesses, saints and martyrs brought into modern life – sitting on trains, attending the sick at supermarkets or revivified at recycling centres – Lives of the Saints is concerned with grace and the elevation of the commonplace. Sometimes, McCann borrows prayer forms for his lyrics, and the collection is also full of odes celebrating family members, strangers, friends, religious figures and other poets. Its primary mode, though, might be a sort of platonic dialogue, a gentle sort of reckoning with ideas of authority, martyrdom and judgment. Stephen, the first martyr, for example, who suggests that “To forgive is to be close to Him”, is challenged with a vision of “the little boy I see with a sniper bullet/ lodged in his throat”; elsewhere, the poet-speaker of Aquinas on the Train worries “I’ve lost the way to speak/ to someone I disagree with”. Across Lives of the Saints, McCann works to recover that loss, bridging gaps and forming empathic bonds across the demands and negotiations of faith. These are warm, often comradely quarrels, seeking common ground and understanding, concerned with forgiveness, empathy, the possibility of restitution.There are echoes here of Wendy Cope, Christopher Smart, Mark Doty and Marie Howe – who is playfully beatified in the final poem – and the poems are at their best when the subject matter is most difficult or fraught. Michael’s Passage Over the Border playfully ironises a journey through an army checkpoint near Newry, the levity and warmth of its telling underscoring the intrusion of politics and history into a moment otherwise played to a score of Kate Bush and visions of angels. There is, throughout this book, and fittingly considering the title, an overarching glow of love, a determination to find beauty, “despite things going unbeautifully/ beyond the lip/ of the creamy window sill”.