Michael Coady Accomplished musician, teacher and poet ‘of unsung lives and destinies’

Michael Coady, who has died aged 84, was a highly accomplished artist, writer, teacher and musician whose work was inspired by Waterford’s Suir Valley and the Three Sisters river catchment where he was born and reared.

Flowing water “refreshes the mind and spirit “and “I can’t imagine a town without a river”, he said in the 1986 RTÉ TV documentary I Live

Here on his deep connection with his native Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary.

His editor and publisher, Peter Fallon of The Gallery Press, noted that his writing emerged from “an intimately known anchorage of place, with abiding themes of transience and continuity, chance and memory, set against the human interplay of unsung lives and destinies”.

Coady was born in Carrick-on-Suir, in 1939, and studied at the CBS. He grew up in a musical household, as his mother Dora Power was a musician and leader of her own dance band. His father, George, was a painter and decorator who suffered from tuberculosis and was a talented watercolourist in later years.

As his son James recalled, Coady was involved with dance bands from his teens, playing trombone and occasionally guitar and was conductor with the Carrick-on-Suir Brass Band.

Coady studied at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, University of Cork and the University of Galway. He took up a teaching post in Carrick-on-Suir, and his first poem was published in The Irish Press newspaper’s New Irish Writing page. Writing in The Irish Times, poet Bernard O’Donoghue had praised his “sureness of technique” and “unlaboured control of dialect in the ‘overheard’ prose stories”. “In Michael Coady’s work, the local is never patronised; without ever being sentimental or mawkish, it is an accepting view of the world. At the end, you still wonder how Coady does it, how he achieves this humane sense of natural goodness, the most difficult of all things to represent convincingly,” O’Donoghue wrote.

His first collection of poems, Two for a Woman, Three for a Man, was published by The Gallery Press in 1979, and he won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award that year.

His subsequent collections for The Gallery Press included Oven Lane (1987, revised edition 2014), which was launched by his close friend musician Liam Clancy, All Souls (1997), One Another (2003), Going by Water (2009) and Given Light (2017). His awards included the Francis MacManus Prize for his fiction in 1987 and 1993, and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in 2004.

He was elected to the membership of Aosdána in 1998, and during the 1990s he travelled to Newfoundland, and north America to explore links with south-east Ireland with the support of the Arts Council. He held the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in Pennsylvania in 2005, and also spent a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris.

He collaborated with many composers, and music was a constant thread, as Clifden Community Arts Festival founder Brendan Flynn recalled. Flynn first met Coady at Listowel Writers’ Week, and described him as “generous, understated, low key about his achievements”, which represent “a wonderful legacy to those who knew and loved him”.

Coady noted that “we all carry the ghosts of other lives within our genes”, in a contribution to RTÉ producer John Quinn’s Open Mind guest lecture series.

He recalled his “most intense and unforeseen experience of memory and the power of the written word” was trying to write a poem, named The Letter, to heal a three-generation-old family wound. Coady had learned that his great-grandfather, James Coady, “an impoverished boatman on the Suir”, had emigrated to America in the 1880s after the death of his wife, Mary. He left his only living child, a boy of seven, behind, and wrote to him 30 years later from Philadelphia, seeking forgiveness. The man who had been abandoned, Coady’s grandfather Michael, “dramatically burned the letter and never replied”.

Walter Dunphy of Carrick-on-Suir’s Brewery Lane Theatre said Coady’s death “leaves a significant gap in our cultural landscape”, and “a sense of part of what we are now gone from us”.

“Once in a generation, a town gives birth to someone special. We took pride in having a published poet living in our midst,” he added.

Michael Coady is survived by his wife Martina, daughters, Niamh and Lucy, son James, and extended family.