The poems in Miriam Gamble's third collection journey through scenes and landscapes at once of the world and of the mind. By turns uncanny, dark, poignant and uproarious, What Planet sets individuality of perception and inventiveness of memory against fixed certainties, probing chaos in a post-truth world. Winner of the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize
Frank Ormsby's seventh collection of poems reflects not only the beauty of the Irish landscape and the sensuous and aesthetic impact of the small farms among which he grew up, but also the continuing violence of the 'Troubles'. Close to the surface of mountain and bogland lie the hidden graves of the 'Disappeared'.
Kerry Hardie's new poems are the work of time and the cycles of growth, they are songs about saints and scholars, the natural world, exaltation and suffering and ordinary joy, the quiet accumulation of the slowly learned lessons of a lived life. There are narratives of the wondrous bewilderments of life as well as homages to the dead and the dying.
Irish American poet Julie O'Callaghan's first book since Tell Me This Is Normal: New & Selected Poems. Her new poems have evolved from early monologues, written in American demotic, to poems of heartache on the death of her husband, the poet Dennis O'Driscoll. But even in these harrowing poems she never loses her ear for absurdities of modern life.
Aoife Lyall's debut collection Mother, Nature explores the tragic and tender experiences of pregnancy and early motherhood, from ante-natal complications and the devastating pain of miscarriage to the overwhelming joy of healthy delivery and normal infancy. Born and raised in Dublin, Aoife Lyall now lives in the Scottish Highlands.
Sean O Riordain (1916-77) was the most important Irish-language poet of modern times. He revitalised poetry in Irish, combining the world of Irish literature with that of modern English and European literature. His poems address 'the nature of human existence and the place of the individual in a universe without meaning' (Gearoid Denvir).
Matthew Sweeney's final collection brings together poems written during a year of debilitating illness before his death from Motor Neuron Disease in 2018. All his verve and spiky humour are here, following, as always, unnerving dream logic. But the dream is now a nightmare and the catastrophe, impending in all his earlier poems, has come to pass.
In The Voyage of St Brendan, A.B. Jackson tells the tale of the legendary seafaring Irish abbot in poetry and prose. After burning a book of fantastical stories, Brendan is compelled to sail the ocean with a crew of six monks in a leather-skinned currach. The book includes a series of black and white linocuts by the American artist Kathleen Neeley.