"Beneath Our Feet"

Published in 2018 by Abbey Press, 'Beneath Our Feet' is a compilation of poems that will seep into your soul, making you look deeper into life and all of it's fragility.

Endorsed from Philip Orr; '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.

Endorsement from Theo Dorgan;

It is possible, probably inescapable, to read Wilfred Owen’s letters home as a simplifying

attempt to describe the impossible to a reader distant from the war. On the other hand, the poems, above all the coruscating ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, rise to a height 

expressive of the horror of mechanised slaughter that one cannot easily imagine surpassed. Here Mel McMahon, delicately and with considerable poetic tact, spans out a bridge between the loving, sparing, son and the clear-eyed, savagely truthful poet. 

In McMahon’s shaping, “The shelled land shakes off/ Its dust of brief concussion“, and a

measured, unexpected, voice comes clear of the cloud.