Girouard Avenue (2009) now at the Internet Archive

2226 Girouard Avenue is the door on the right
leading to the upstairs flat

A few years ago I decided to digitize my out-of-print books and make them available as free downloads online. Only recently have I begun this project, it's long term and I'm slow at getting it off the ground...

I know doing this seems counter-intuitive to most people (especially poets), giving away the books, but I feel it is only common sense. Poetry has a very limited and ever-diminishing audience and "popularity". Copies of my books that I have left, hard copies, are doing nothing sitting in our basement in cardboard boxes.

Putting these books online (as is my plan) gives them a second life. It might even find a few readers for them.

So, here is a link to Girouard Avenue (2009), one of my favourite of my books. It got a lot of positive reaction from people who could relate to the content and I liked this very much. Someone living in Arizona told me it is a "holy" book, and that is how I feel about it. When I was preparing this book to put it online, digitizing it, I realized that it is some of my better work. It is the work I did during the late 1990s and 2000s, my first book since my Selected Poems in 1998. It is poetry inspired by my extensive family history work. There is also an essay that came out of writing this book, "Remembering Girouard Avenue" (also available at archive dot org) that explains something of the importance to me of Girouard Avenue.

In sum, the physical location called Girouard Avenue in Montreal became a spiritual place for me, it is my psychic center. As I wrote elsewhere, "This memoir ("Remembering Girouard Avenue") is an addendum to my book of poems, Girouard Avenue (2009). This is my psychic center, this is where I began in life and where I often return in dreams, poems, and memories." 

Poems of a Period, 1971 chapbook

For a long time I have felt that some of us poets might be better served if we made our work available, online, and free. Of course, as long as a book is in print we have an obligation to the publisher to promote the book, sell copies, and do all we can to make the book a success (that's an obligation to both publisher and to ourselves). But I have books that have been out of print for the last thirty and more years, they are on library shelves but otherwise unavailable to anyone who might be interested in the work. It seems to me that it would be practical to put the book online and give access to the book without cost. It's also possible to digitize and sell the book on Amazon, but my purpose is more to find readers than to make money through meager sales... A new paradigm exists for selling music and something similar is true of publishing poetry. So, there it is, this is my plan and I'm going to stick with it.

Here is my first chapbook, published in August 1971.

Patrick Morrissy and Mary Phelan, some of their descendants and relatives in Canada

This is Beaubear Island, just off Newcastle and Chatham, NB; 
Patrick Morrissy and some other members of the family worked here
when they first arrived in the Colony of New Brunswick,
Beaubear Island was the site of ship building.

This is a history of the descendants, and some of the descendants' relatives, of Patrick Morrissy and his wife Mary Phelan. Patrick and Mary and their family moved to New Brunswick around 1837 from County Tipperary, Ireland. I have placed particular emphasis on the descendants of their son Laurence Morrissey, my great great grandfather, who moved to Montreal from New Brunswick in the early 1840s. The generations this history deals with are Patrick Morrissy and Mary Phelan who emigrated to New Brunswick; their son Laurence Morrissey and his wife Johannah Meany who moved from New Brunswick to Montreal; Laurence and Johannah's son Thomas Morrissey who married Mary Callaghan; Thomas and Mary's son John Martin Morrissey who married Edith Sweeney; Martin and Edith's son Edgar Morrissey who married Hilda Parker; and then a brief discussion of their two sons, John and Stephen Morrissey. 

Remembering Girouard Avenue

This

 is the history of the Morrissey family of Montreal during their residency at
2226 Girourd Avenue—it includes family history, births and deaths, holidays at
their country cottage, evenings playing cards, the generations of Morrisseys who 

lived there, and the presence of Edith Sweeney Morrissey for whom the door was always 

open for any family member who needed a place to live—from the mid-1920s to the late 

1960s. 

That's me, in the late 1990s, standing in front of my grandmother's flat at
2226 Girouard Avenue.

"This memoir is an addendum to my book of poems, Girouard Avenue (2009). This
is my psychic center, this is where I began in life and where I often return in dreams, 

poems, and memories." 

Darrell Morrisey essay on the Internet Archive

The Morrisey Family:
Darrell, TL, Syd & Clara outside Hazelbrae,
85 Churchill Avenue, Westmount

I've just posted my essay on Darrell Morrisey (no relation to me), a "lost" member of the Beaver Hall Group of artists, at the Internet Archive. Included is a postscript with photographs of two paintings by Darrell that were discovered in May 2014; these painting are, so far, the only paintings we have by her.