Ancestral Worship

ANCESTRAL WORSHIP is a homage to my adopted city. Hong Kong has always been a city of immigrants and I am simply one more who has been welcomed and made the city my home. This new collection deals with the Hong Kong of my youth and my relationship with the modern-day city that I have grown up with. Some of the pieces tackle the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised in British Hong Kong during the 1960s and 70s, when it was still a colony with a capital C and inequality and unfairness was rife. Other poems tackle how attitudes and approaches changed from the late 1960s onwards, coinciding with my own teenage years and political and social awakening. "Ancestral Worship pays tribute to the power of memory, to overcome loss, grief, and the ability of words to remember and revive, whether the shadow of a cherished city, or the silhouette of deceased loved ones." -- Agnès Bun in The Asian Review of Books "What sets McKirdy ... apart is his ability to stay away from the rose-tinted visions that are easily available to a social group being elevated into positions of power and prestige for decades" -- Clarence Tsui in the South China Morning Post von McKirdy, David