The Kabul Olympics

The Kabul Olympics is a book of impossible places, from the imagined Kabul of the title poem, to ‘City of Trees’ which conjures an alternate, parallel Manchester in the aftermath of the Arena bombing, from a plane spiralling ever upwards into the eye of a storm in ‘Godsend’ to the becalmed travels of ‘The Harbours’, a sequence which reflects on nationalism and border crossing.
Many of these poems start out by finding themselves in the dark, nel mezzo del cammin, on journeys whose destinations seem uncertain, an uncertainty to which the book gets accustomed, teasing out strands of inheritance and departures which take the poems offshore, into the heart of political crises as well as returning to the household lyrics McAuliffe has made his own. This is vivid poetry, which pits individual lives and ordinary days and hours and minutes against the historical events and catastrophes which would blow them away.