Ancestral Worship: Poems

The portrait of a city as an old flame: poet David McKirdy is a man in love. His second collection of poems, Ancestral Worship, is an ode to Hong Kong, where he moved at the tender age of four.

In this most recent work, he sketches the outline of the town, his town, where he still resides, and fills it with treasured memories: postcards from his life trimmed to poem size. Colorful characters walk by, such as an 82-year-old Indonesian shoe shiner, rickshaw coolies, sampan girls, with the signature scents of the town as an olfactive backdrop: