Irish Musicians/American Friends
Reviews

Winner, American Book Award, 1986

"Beautiful, simple, often heartbreaking poems about the big-city Irish, by a son of immigrants. . . . [Winch] undeniably has the gift—a blend of the two Jameses, Joyce and Farrell."—The Washington Post   

"Witty, wild-Irish utterances they are, suggesting the music of his subjects in a curiously deadpan voice, described by one reader as ‘poems pretending they are not poems.' The poems are intense, directly available."—Small Press

"[Irish Musicians/American Friends] chronicles a generation of Irish musicians who emigrated from Ireland in the 1920s and raised children in New York City who were themselves to become musicians; Winch delivers their milieu and progress perfectly.  In a seemingly ‘artless' prosody, he sustains a surface of language from which a world and a history are artfully rendered, with unforgettable characters. Pound's dictum that more writing fails from lack of character than lack of talent suggests the strength of this work. The characters are fully drawn and the intelligence which informs their portraits is the voice of character itself."—Liam Rector, The Hudson Review

"The poems in Irish Musicians/American Friends could be storiestold about a man in a bar, or at someone's kitchen table, or for that matter, at the man's wake. Or they could be called talking blues, sung in an Irish American tempo. They are so easy to get into that . . . you can read them even if you're not another poet. . . . Such a voice is so rarely heard in print."—Denise O'Meara, New York Irish History Journal

"These poems are heartbreakingly exquisite in their simple eye and ear truths. I love Terence Winch's voice, his people." —Richard Price

"The poems completely move me as being Irish, they get the depth, the unspeaking of our very private people. The language is just right each time the way they pretend they are not poems. They rescue the lost emigrant culture, making a real Ireland and real myth out of Irish America. I am convinced it is a pioneer effort."—James Liddy

"The poems are anecdotal memoirs about the older men, the Irish musicians, who inducted Winch, the son of Irish immigrants, into their profession. Each poem's vignette or character sketch is connected to the others by the Irish American milieu the characters shared, but more intimately by the flatness of the voice describing the people and the happenings. The voice features a vocabulary and syntax so controlled it creates the illusion of a perfect surface tension, perhaps the perfect expression of the times and atmosphere Winch describes in these poems. It's the kind of contemporary classic you want to share with the world."—Michael Lally