'Beneath Our Feet' is a poetic tribute to probably the greatest of First World War poets but also to all those young men whose sensibility was shocked to the core by what they saw and what they had to do on the battlefield, Mel McMahon's collection of poems is evocative, deft, often tender and sometimes painfully stark. I'd recommend it as invaluable reading both for those who treasure the arts of poetry and those who continue to be aghast at the personal impact of that most brutal and pointless of conflicts.

Philip Orr

Paula Meehan's Comments on Out of Breath.

Mel McMahon is an archaeologist of memory, private and communal. His people are those that history often overlooks, yet their decencies and quotidian caregiving are the very stuff that holds community together. Mel McMahon serves them well in poems that honour their lives with tenderness and dignity. The light of his love for his subjects illuminates his lines and stanzas, and
makes salvific his meditations on their struggles, and on his own.

Mark Roper's Comments on Out of Breath.

That this first full collection from Mel McMahon is long overdue stems no doubt from the same modesty that informs the work: these are quiet,
generous, graceful, memorable poems, never raising their voice, never needing to.

Sir Ken Robinson, on reading Beneath Our Feet.

“Beneath Our Feet is a piercing, poetic reflection on the human experience of war. Each of
these brief, finely-crafted pieces is a penetrating evocation of …the war experience.
Together they form a powerful, almost stroboscopic image of the larger tragedy that war
always conjures.”

Poet, Colin Dardis, on reading Out of Breath.

“McMahon’s crafting of verbs shines throughout. Here is a poet not afraid to be inventive
and push language into new applications. He turns a mean phrase illuminating whole poems
with just one or two dazzling lines of original thought.”