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Song for a Raggy Boy (1991) - Frenuyum - 12-04-2025
On a morning in 1939 a young Cork boy left from Glanmire Railway Station handcuffed to a Civic Guard on route to three years imprisonment in a reformatory outside Cork. That boy was the writer Patrick Galvin. Song For A Raggy Boy is his testament of those years. “My voice is a stone child in a dark reformatory,” he writes at the start of this harrowing and sometimes humourous book; and once within those stone walls Galvin, as narrator, becomes almost invisible. Instead, switching between the first and third person, he focuses not only on the emotions of an individual child but also on the forces upholding the institution. Shot through with glimpses of the Cork streets which he has left behind (and which he so brilliantly described in his acclaimed first volume of memoirs, Song For A Poor Boy) Song For A Raggy Boy is a powerful continuation of Patrick Galvin’s story, a vivid evocation of life through a child’s eyes in the 1940’s. One of Ireland’s most distinctive poets, Patrick Galvin’s books include Folk Tales For The General and a Selected Poems. His plays like The Last Burning are regularly staged in Ireland and abroad. This is the second volume of his autobiography which has been described as being “destined to become a classic”.