PHILIP CASEY was born in London in 1950 and grew up in Co. Wexford; he died in 2018 in Dublin. He wrote both poetry and fiction, and his poetry collections included The Planets and Stars Became Friends, Those Distant Summers, After Thunder, The Year of the Knife, Dialogue in Fading Light, and Tried and Sentenced. He has also published four novels, The Fabulists, The Water Star and The Fisher Child, completing The Bann River Trilogy, and before his death, he wrote The Coupla. The selection of poems published here are a few of those he sent the editor of this journal back in 2006, and were originally published in Sirena: Poetry, Art, and Criticism, founded and edited for The Johns Hopkins University Press, by the same editor of The Pasticheur: Literature, Art, & Ideas.

Philip was a warm and affable fellow, dear and known in almost every corner of Dublin. The photograph was sent by the author a few days before his death.