Out of Breath by Mel McMahon (Summer Palace Press, April 2016) is a carefully calibrated poetry collection that invites readers into quiet moments of reflection and emotional epiphanies. Across its 64 pages, McMahon explores the fragile beauty of everyday life—capturing the delicate interplay between memory, family, absence and the slow passage of time.
Born in County Armagh, McMahon approaches language with the sensitivity of a natural observer. His poems are crafted with a gentle restraint that allows commonplace images— cups filled with tea leaves, a forgotten telephone—to become portals into inner worlds. “Telephone”, one of the collection’s standout pieces, is simple and evocative: it traces the speaker’s hesitation as they hold an old phone number faded into memory, laying bare a tender struggle with grief and attachment.
Published by a small, independent press, Out of Breath affirms the quiet power of intimate, lyrical poetry. McMahon’s tone is familiar and assured, trustworthy and confident. His language moves purposefully; lines flow from effortless conversational rhythms into subtle but resonant insights about life’s impermanence.
Key themes include:
Memory and Loss
A recurring preoccupation in these poems is the tension between cherished absence and present time. McMahon drifts between vivid recollections of people and place and the ache caused by their change or their passing.  As former Ireland Professor of Poetry, Paula Meehan, says: ‘Mc Mahon is an archaeologist of memory, private and communal. His people are those that history often overlooks, yet their decency, their quotidian caregiving is 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.’
Domestic and Natural Spaces
The poet often finds significance in the minute, often overlooked, details that are present in the infrastructure of our daily lives. Whether it be in the discovery of a butterfly hibernating in a garage or a hidden library book found decades beyond its return date, Mc Mahon discovers narratives that infuse the business of living  with gratitude and revelation.
Silence  and Communication
Whether literal (a phone at the end of a line) or metaphorical (emotional distance between loved ones), communication—or its absence—is central. Poems often pivot on moments of attempted connection, unspoken emotion, or the brace between words.
Breath, Stillness and Movement
 
The title poem (if included) gestures towards the act of breathing as a marker of life, hope and exhaustion. Each line bears rhythmic awareness—when to pause, when to yield, when to return to breath—to evoke both the physical and emotional heaviness of existing.
Childhood 
Central to Out of Breath is the wonder and excitement experienced by the poet in his discovery of childhood games. Born in an era when technology did not dominate a child’s free time, the evocative sequence of poems, ‘State of Play,’ captures not only a unique time in the poet’s life but also a special time in the shifting cultural landscape of children’s games in 1970s Ireland.

In short, Out of Breath is a gentle, reflective collection that lingers on the verge of emotion: never fully plunging, yet letting the reader know that the depths of loss, memory and connection are never far beneath the surface. As poet, Mark Roper, states: ‘…these are quiet, generous, graceful, memorable poems, never raising their voice, never needing to.’