The book is full of grim occurrences and apparitions, but told in a tipsy, confiding style ... Poguemahone is like a high dive: The toughest part of reading it might be convincing your feet to leave the board. Once you’ve done that, gravity does the rest ... Poguemahone, living up to its author’s reputation, is daring, studded with brilliance, raucous and exhausting. It might overstay its welcome, but you’ll remember its visit.

... a bleakly comic, wildly original 600-page epic about loss, exile and mental illness, written almost entirely in lightly punctuated free verse ... These memories, as recounted by Dan, are by turns hilarious and quite terrifying, moving fluently between the comic grotesqueries of Withnail and I and the ontological horror of The Exorcist ... My initial reaction was equivocal because, on a first reading, this lacks the punch and depth of poetry. But compare the same extract presented as straight prose...setting it out as prose makes it clear how artfully the material has been handled. Poguemahone is, in content and execution, frequently astonishing, and galloping through a very long novel at the rate of three pages per minute is an exhilarating sensory experience. The first half in particular is marvellously fresh and underwrought. As things darken there are fewer laughs, and the final pages are almost unbearably tense ... There are irritations ... With few exceptions, the novel in verse doesn’t much appeal to today’s mainstream publishers, and this is not only because verse novels are often awful, but also because even the good ones rarely find a large audience. One can only hope Poguemahone attracts a readership beyond its crowdfunding backers on Unbound because, in its haunting strangeness and blazing originality, it deserves far more than a cult following.

McCabe’s work has been repeatedly compared to Ulysses. Similarities include the importance of music: Poguemahone’s 600-plus pages deploy white space with a musical as well as a structuring function ... Many of the book’s richly painted cast of characters are cursed or haunted, either by the squat’s demons or their own, dying early by their own hands or through abuse. At the centre of it all is the stormy relationship between Dan and Una ... Though it won’t appeal to all fans of his earliest work, McCabe may be right when he claims that Poguemahone is his best book: it is startlingly original, moving, funny, frightening and beautiful.

... evokes the expected 1970s trio of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll—the music of David Bowie, Mott the Hoople and of course the Pogues always seems to be blasting in the background—but the psychedelia has a demonic aspect that Dan and Una are prone to attribute to some malign spirit ... The notable feature, though, is the writing. This is free verse in the freest possible sense—nothing more, really, than line breaks imposed on an otherwise unbroken monologue. The style operates under the assumption that the Irish oral tradition is intrinsically poetic, which is true to an extent, but perhaps not to the extent that this verbose, frequently repetitive novel thinks. Mr. McCabe takes exaggerated liberties with the reader’s time and patience in the way that an elderly patron might with a stranger at a pub. There are plenty of outrageous stories, all delivered with unflagging flair, but prospective readers are advised to equip themselves like that cornered pub-goer: with a tall glass of whiskey at hand.

McCabe has always seemed the sporting sort – a fine handicapper of his own books – which is apparent here, in his 14th novel, with his decision to carry the weight of 600-plus pages in a kind of free-form prose. This might be to your taste. This reader found little pleasure in it, though, and by the end found it infuriating, with its title chiming in the mind for all the wrong reasons ...Poguemahone is an achievement for the sheer effort of creating this waterfall of words, and to stick with its format, which I’m sure had McCabe questioning himself in the process. But a novel idea does not always give birth to novel expression, and a step back in style is sometimes required to appreciate the beauty of forceful writing; the book’s chaos leads to confusion for the reader, too, not complexity ... There is the expected McCabe combination of linguistic flights of fancy, doses of the supernatural and the thunderclaps of vernacular weighted with the mists of the old country. Yet the writing never reaches the hoped-for levels of ingenuity, wit or grace to fire the form. Discordant voices are fine if the language elegantly spins and wheels, but when it feels like one-note writing the riff becomes boring and reads like a weak Beckett monologue delivered from the bog by way of NW6 ... The characters do not feel drawn with much depth or humanity, so why should we care? This fault is partly down to Poguemahone’s structure – free-form prose does not give the writer, or reader, much chance to chew the cud – but there are other reasons. Too often the book lazily resorts to flinty flips back to 'blessed oul Oireland' by these cliched exiled ruins ... The never-ending references to 1960s and ’70s pop culture also become tiresome ... when you get to the novel’s supposed pay-off, it feels middlin’ for the mileage you’ve put in ... Poguemahone is stuffed with rambles of blather; if you were on the receiving end of something similar at a Pogues tribute night in Cricklewood from some old boring soak with the green-tinted glasses on, you’d be drinking up and making your excuses to leave. You’re just expecting that bowsie Behan to be mentioned any minute, and…oh ... As a McCabe fan I had high hopes: I read Poguemahone in small chunks, in large chunks, intermittently, and still could not bring myself to care for it. If it was funny you might cut it some slack, but there’s little humour here; its approach to mental illness is also debatable.

McCabe draws the reader into a rambling web replete with Gaelic folklore, IRA agitation, and a soundtrack of glam and progressive rock. Lively and ambitious in form, this admirably extends the range of McCabe’s career-long examination of familial and childhood trauma.

A searing family drama and bittersweet evocation of nostalgia for lost youth ... Despite these bleak themes, the novel is not without its share of humor—early ’70s pop-culture references abound, and the Joycean linguistic play is a pleasure to read. Structurally, the book is a marvel; McCabe’s inventive use of enjambment and stanza layout push the boundaries of what is possible in narrative storytelling. The vernacular, drunken verse format may be daunting at first, but after a few pages the narrative develops a hypnotic rhythm ... A moving saga of youth, age, and memory—by turns achingly poetic, knowingly philosophical, and bitterly funny.