Salmon Poetry – förlag

Cohort, with its three-poem introduction and book-length sonnet sequence, draws inspiration from the sonnet's origins to update it for the Digital Age. Linked from its earliest days with legal proceedings and a modern psychology of conflicted love, the sonnet held together what wanted to fly apart. Petrarch miniaturized the standoff of forces in the oxymorons he used to characterize his divided emotions - sick health and freezing fire. Acknowledging this tradition of warring but tightly bound forces, Fried re-conceives the contemporary sonnet as an arena where fragments of self and samples of lingo play off against one another. And colouring these contests is a love intrigue that implicates the reader."Tense with dark wit and wild originality, Cohort, Philip Fried's eagerly-awaited new book, opens exciting territory where poems haven't dared to venture-the toxic side of the Information Age as it veers out of control. With a sharp eye for the mythic in the utterly contemporary, and a Swiftian deadpan, Fried creates a world of Babylonian flow-charts, ocean treadmills, Turing and Tiresias, the computer and the deposed god. It's a thrill to see the classic sonnet, with its volta and envoi, its echoes of lovers' quarrels, retuned to an age of chaos theory, protocols and strategies turned loose from all rational context, white noise, and endless war."D. NurksePhilip Fried, a New York-based poet and little-magazine editor, has published three previous books of poetry: Mutual Trespasses (1988); Quantum Genesis (1997), which A.R. Ammons called "a major new testament"; and Big Men Speaking to Little Men (Salmon, 2006), which - said Marilyn Hacker - "represents much of what I admire in contemporary American poetry. . . ." Fried also collaborated with his wife, the fine-art photographer Lynn Saville, on a volume combining her nocturnal photographs with poetry from around the world. He is also the founder of The Manhattan Review, an international journal that for three decades has published the best in Anglophone poetry and translations.

"... a social critique as lithe and imaginative as that of the con-merchants who run the show… A satire which eschews moderation and openly admits its own savagery can only succeed."Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000"This is work which raises the question of what the political poem can be, for us now, in our several cultures." Siobhan Campbell, Dissent Magazine"... wonderfully inventive imagery" Laurie Smith, Magma"The left should hurry to welcome this collection. Here is poetry that we can identify with, that tells of our hopes and fears and doubts and questions, that puts our lives on the map too. The fact that one of our own can tell such stories in a way that is so powerful and satisfying is something to be proud of." Joe Conroy, Red Banner"He is the only one of my Irish contemporaries who makes me laugh out loud regularly, not just because the work is funny, but because it has that great sense of character behind it, where one pictures the speaker in all his curmudgeonly grumpy-old-man-ness glaring at the reader wondering what the hell they're laughing at!" Nigel McLoughlin, IotaKevin Higgins was born in London in 1967, but grew up in Galway City where he still lives. He is co-organiser of the highly successful Over The Edge literary events series. His previous two collections of poems, The Boy With No Face (2005) and Time Gentlemen, Please (2008), were both also published by Salmon Poetry. The Boy With No Face was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award. His work also features in the Forward Book of Poetry 2009, Best of Irish Poetry 2009 (Southword Editions) and Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Ed Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010).

"Simmons B. Buntin writes with scrupulous attention to the agency of love in a wounded and venomous world. Whether he considers Hiroshima or dead albatrosses, the small marvels of finches or ladybugs, or his daughter's accidental plunge through a plate glass window, his poems celebrate nature, family, and the healing power of beauty."Alison Hawthorne DemingSet largely in the rugged but resplendent borderlands of Arizona and Sonora, Mexico—and ranging as far afield as the Israeli desert, the Sweden of his mother's youth, the Midway Atoll, and Hiroshima, Japan, on the 40th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb—Simmons B. Buntin's second collection of poems gathers unexpected insight from our built and natural landscapes to blossom into poems of striking beauty and stunning realization. 'Shine', the book's first section, ranges from the violet light of the last night in Eden to a daughter's coming of age and desire. 'Flare', the second section, weaves from roadside wildflowers to an evening in SoHo to a mother's memory of Nazi bombers overhead before her own storied migrations to America. And 'Inflorescence', the final section, braids the experience of a daughter recovering from emergency surgery following a severe accident, with the slow and mesmerizing bloom—or inflorescence—of the yard's magnificent agave. In reading the poems of this finely crafted and lyrical book, you'll find that—like the daughter releasing ladybugs in the poem 'Shower'—the open room of your heart, too, will be filled with 'pure red joy'.Simmons B. Buntin is the American author of one previous book of poems, Riverfall, published by Salmon Poetry in 2005. His award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in numerous North American and European journals and anthologies. He is the founding editor of the acclaimed international journal Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, for which he also writes a regular editorial. He is the recipient of the Colorado Artists Fellowship for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets prize, and grants by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Tucson Pima Arts Council. He is an avid photographer, website designer, and all-around rabble-rouser who lives with his wife and two daughters in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona.

Concerned Attentions is Knute Skinner's first book of poetry since his collected edition, Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007, appeared from Salmon. As his readers may expect, the new work exhibits his artful and often moving, unnerving, or humourous turns of phrase. Moreover, it displays the poet's continuing fascination with the tenuous relationship between the quotidian and the otherworldly.

Knute Skinner was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but for fifty years has had a home in County Clare, where he now lives with his spouse Edna Faye Kiel. His collected edition Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007, from Salmon, contained new work along with work taken from thirteen previous books. His collection The Other Shoe won the 2004-2005 Pavement Saw Chapbook Award. A limited edition of his poems, translated into Italian by Roberto Nassi, was published by Damocle Edizioni, Chioggia, Italy, in 2011. A memoir, Help Me to a Getaway, was published by Salmon in March 2010.

"Ruth O'Callaghan's poetry has a rare ability to sustain the highest emotional and spiritual stakes." Fiona Sampson.

Philosophical, exuberant, incantatory, sensual and meditative, these poems embrace the complexities of death, loss and love. Although observed with a detached eye their unflinching truth is simultaneously intimate and compassionate. The poems, written in both formal and free verse, constantly explore the boundaries within the human situation. The poet's fascination with words and language lend both a lyricism and restraint while her rhythms echo those of time, love, loss and grief.

Ruth O'Callaghan has five collections of poetry, has been translated into six languages and is much anthologised. Invited to read throughout Asia, Europe, and the U.S.A., she was awarded a gold medal for poetry at the XXX WCP in Taiwan. The Arts Council sponsored her visit to Mongolia to collaborate with women poets and this resulted in a book and a CD. An international competition adjudicator and editor, she is also a judge for the Koestler whose awards encourage prisoners to participate in the Arts. She hosts two poetry venues in London - the revenue from these events support three Cold Weather Shelters.

Philip Fried's Squaring the Circle is humorous and yet also mysterious in its evocation of esoteric physics and theology. The title poem presents a mystic/scientific quest for an impossible geometry as both a vaudevillian historical catastrophe and a way of understanding God. Throughout, Fried uses pastiche and the mashup of texts to explore historical moments and personal history. Behind its many forms and approaches, however, the book conveys the strong sense of a “persona"—the feeling, as Stanley Kunitz once said, that the poet has imagined a person who could write these poems.

As with all of Nicki Griffin’s poems a sense of place pervades this collection. Voices carry along rivers, a boat turns on its anchor, gardens flush with roses, borders are crossed. It is full of points of no return, of transformations: buildings that seemed solid and permanent, tumbling or being taken apart, the natural world in constant flux, death and its interminable aftermath. There is an understanding that chaos is never far away, but also the sense of the ties that bind us all and, finally, redemption and the possibility of resurrection.

‘The poems of Mary Melvin Geoghegan are struck with a new vitality derived from the poet’s rootedness in a highly contemporary world. The maternal psyche is explored delicately, throughout this collection and the nature of of human inconsistency. There is Dublin and a memory of the Phibsboro mart, The National Gallery and Monet, Madrid and the art of Picasso and Kandisky, and through the poems she draws the reader on to examine the ways in which an artist’s fury ‘first scythed through the pain’.

In this way change is examined, and often through painting an improverished Rembrandt is raised to light here, and Le Brocquy’s ‘Army massing’ is cleverly linked to what she describes as ‘the same war cry echoing across/Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine....’ The work is fresh, sensitive and does not shirk from the emotional pull which surely is the foundation of good poetry.’

Mary O'Donnell

“it’s not very feminist to consider myself a mouldy slut I’ve agency over my body and all that 21st-century shite” A young woman wakes feeling raw and tender after a one-night stand. She leaves a strange man sleeping in her bed and goes running. Marked by the anxiety of living in a city that does not feel like home, she must face the memories and men kept under her bed.

hese compelling, beautiful poems reveal a poet who has long found an original footing in the society in which she lives, finding in it a source of inspiration. Anne Tannam is energetically aware of the global sphere of injustice and beauty, of unfair destinies and healing gestures. Festivals and birthday celebrations register as sources for connecting with the life-force in all its forms, but also with mother-love. Mid-life is evoked as an opportunity for renewal, the universe leaning across the table,/gesturing with both hands,/eager to fill me in, and a possible breast tumour occupies the same space as Schrödinger’s Cat. Elsewhere in this book, Yeats’ hazel wood still lives through a hazel sapling which unfurls an alphabet of hope. The redressing voice of inner charity at work in her lines raises hurt and loss from the silt of memory and creates something serene with it. Dublin viewed as a local space is suggestively evoked in images and visions of people she has loved. And it is this tender voice that conspires with other, socially-engaged poems, creating an authentic collection that will speak to readers everywhere. Mary O’Donnell Anne Tannam’s beautiful collection, Twenty-six Letters of a New Alphabet, invites the reader to reflect on the quiet joys of daily living — swans on the canal, the comfort of home — but does not shy away from the challenges that make up the fabric of a life. The poet turns her brave, unflinching gaze upon the inevitable sorrows of ageing and bereavement with an understated self-awareness that will speak to all readers. There is deep empathy here for the plight of those who have no home and those who have fled their homes in search of shelter. This collection offers a collage of experience, where conversations with the dead, memories and meditations on the present are woven together in a kind of stock-taking, looking back over the rites of passage on the journey, and those yet to come. A heart-warming collection, full of wit and wisdom. Liz McSkeane Anne Tannam is a poet of honesty and intimacy; the poems in this new collection, written with a distinctive diamond clarity and seamlessly linked, create the feeling of a lifelong conversation with a trusted friend; the concatenation of love, loss and essential silence. Maurice Devitt

With a foreword by President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins and contributions from over 100 poets and members of the wider literary community. 2021 is a very special year for Salmon as we celebrate 40 years publishing the finest Irish and international literature. To mark that achievement, and to pay tribute to the work of publisher Jessie Lendennie, 100 writers have come together in this special Festschrift presented as a complete surprise to Jessie at Christmas 2020.

Keep looking at the outside world until the outside world is no longer outside

‘Wyeth is a poet of ideas exquisitely wrought and swarming, demanding a reader awake to complexity on a subtle scale.’ Ailbhe Darcy

‘Adam Wyeth’s work is fresh and intriguing, alive with imaginative riffs, grave humour and more besides – it rewards close attention.’ Derek Mahon

‘Wyeth is a beachcomber on the edge of his own infinities, where fact, legend and anecdote flow together.’ Harry Clifton

‘about:blank crystallizes Adam Wyeth’s grasp of the theatrical power of language. His creative interweaving of poetry, prose, monologue, drama, and theatricality creatively meets the moment we as a society and artistic community find ourselves in.’ Jesse Weaver, New Work Associate, Abbey Theatre

' ‘Words must be some kind of cybernetic hoax,’ Adam Wyeth writes in this hallucinatory and shape-shifting collection. Musing on language and relationships, where ‘words are looking through you’, Wyeth conjures a seeking consciousness from the restless ‘blanks’ of our lives, and like W.S. Graham, a modernist romantic, Wyeth makes writing a raison d’être. The diversity and depth of these inquiries into poetic identity, and self-hood are by turn meditative and dramatic. Here’s a book which delights in the ‘drunkenness of things being various’, and fuses connections from the inner and outer lives of its speakers. Imaginatively rhizomatic, about:blank is both a playful and deadly serious manifesto about how language shapes who we are or what we might be.' Paul Perry

'Wyeth is a remarkable wordsmith with a truly distinctive and unique approach to the craft – in that his words play like firecrackers within their own sound and metaphor scape, truly blending poetic idioms with oblique narrative to produce a highly distinctive and evocative set of worlds unlike any other writer in the field today. about:blank takes readers on an epic journey through a dreamtime text of isolation, love, loss and misspent language that is contemporary Dublin. Written as a circular mixture of narrative-poetry, prose, monologue – the work has also been adapted as an immersive audio journey that is suspended within a binaural stereo soundscape. With the highly regarded and unique talents of actors Olwen Fouéré and Owen Roe this is certain to be a highly memorable, high-profile offering in these times of social isolation.' Michael Barker-Caven, Artistic Director, Civic Theatre, Dublin

Talking down the clock is Seamus Cashman’s fifth volume of poetry. It follows his 2015 ekphrastic book length poem, The Sistine Gaze

In his early collections (Carnival, 1987; Clowns & Acrobats, 2000) with a focus on village life and personal mythologies, the poet found ‘fire crackling faggots / at my feet / I inhaled its fragrance/ and forgave myself’. / I still could see.’. Here in this fifth collection, the poet is seeing within, is threading the ordinary through the abstract, linking the human via button-holes of experience and philosophy, summiting the uncertain and clearly enjoying possibilities encountered enroute. He will experiment, indeed relishes it, as in ‘To the naked woman in the far window’, ‘Be still’, ‘Owl’, ‘Composition’, ‘Fractalities’, ‘Catastrophe turnings’ and others.

The closing poem, which is the collection’s energetic title poem, offers a spiral of excitements and images leading readers through and around the impositions, surprises and confusions of time — echoing our failures to seize and size it, and facing the impossibility of ignoring it. We might learn from its over five hundred lines to ‘Just be’, as we watch time abseiling its own rhythms.

Erosions is John A. Griffin’s first full-length book of poems. Written shortly after he emigrated to the United States, the poems comprise a kind of Bildungsroman exploring themes of boyhood innocence, fantasy, landscapes, nature, death, loss, absence, exile, and a coming into one’s powers as one seeks to apprehend the changes wrought by time, epiphany, and departure. Absence, lines, natural forces, spirituality, and extinction are all leitmotifs in the book, as these combine to displace a burgeoning identity rather than overtly defining one. Erosions seeks to lyricize those forces that shape emerging consciousness and sensibility, so that the aural semantics of the poems are as essential to their decoding as the verbal, linguistic semantics, and it is this stress on the music and rhythms of language the poet hopes will evoke their core and abiding meaning.

Pete Mullineaux’s fifth collection is chock full of ‘strange but true’ surprises: from Plato to pangolins, Microsoft Windows to walruses, foxes to fireworks – offering a serious but at the same time playful exploration of Nature alongside human nature, with a particular focus on ecological concerns and our planet’s vulnerability.

I Imagine Myself is for anyone who has ever imagined they were someone (or something) else. A powerful collection that asserts the freedom to have a visible midlife as a woman, to have difficulties in a relationship and work through them, and to weather the storms of ageing. In ambitious and dynamic poems, I Imagine Myself gives voice to the experience of trying to discover a new self, tracing an arc through illness, middle age, connections to other people and the natural world.

“Edward O’Dwyer’s poems in Exquisite Prisons pack the quotidian with a creeping terror; motorists nervously migrate to investigate the car stalled at the lights, a father is filmed throwing his child higher and higher, a husband wonders if his wife also fantasises about killing him. These poems are savagely ironic, authoritative and delivered in an unsettling coaxing voice that occupies that same dazzling imaginative territory as Shirley Jackson in The Lottery.” Eleanor Hooker

“These are poems which explore the preciousness and unreliability of what we think of as 'the present'. They often unpick fleeting moments, but their impact is enduring. Highly recommended.” Helen Mort

"Thomas Dillon Redshaw is known as the past editor of Éire-Ireland, the founder of New Hibernia Review, and as a scholar of the poetry of John Montague and of the Dolmen Press. All this public industry on behalf of others has obscured the fact that he has been saving the best part of himself for his own poetry. This new selection from Salmon Poetry brings together poems reaching back to Frostian nature-poems redolent of the New England coast, a Vietnam War poem, ekphrastic poems, and splendidly vivid poems on a Midwest tornado and an ice storm. Midway, he digests the influences of Thomas Kinsella, Randall Jarrell, and John Montague, before towards the end one hears Redshaw’s own truest voice in the deeply moving elegies to his father. The clarity of those sorrowful late lyrics is a wonderful achievement, the fruit of fifty years as a practicing poet. Redshaw has spent so much time giving prizes to others, it’s about time someone blew his horn and trumpeted the simple truth: he’s a really good poet."

Adrian Frazier, author of John Behan: The Bull of Sherriff Street (2015)

Lessons in Kindness is a collection exploring identity, sexuality, strength and vulnerability. Through a series of losses and epiphanies, a young woman attempts to make sense of the lessons taught and learned. From the recent referenda in Ireland, to a landscape of women ghosts, Lessons in Kindness is a search for meaning and love, set against the backdrop of the wild Atlantic coast.

“Margo Berdeshevsky’s It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat seems to leap up and declare a rhythmic homage to the world, and one is called to gaze into one’s own eyes and see patterns of the past and future — life and death. And when the speaker says, ‘It was one single arrow of passion, and Eros was good with it’ a unique voice pierces us.”** Yusef Komunyakaa, Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize **

“If the beautiful is what delights us, and the sublime is what leaves us awestruck and wanting to kneel, Margo Berdeshevsky’s poetry is both beautiful and sublime. From the naked hunger of the heart to the cosmic force of ‘that world none can see —’ this poetry rises and rises, falls and rises, on a magnificent music that challenges death, defies our human cruelty, and is faithful.' **Alicia Ostriker, Chancellor Academy of American Poets, NY State Poet Laureate **

“Margo Berdeshevsky, trained as an actress, took a primal influence from Shakespeare’s diction and presents poems of innermost reflection as speeches, soliloquys, spot-lit. The subject here is the world now in its various but one crisis, particularly as a space of war. The witness, perceiver, speaker has come to have the guise or part of an old woman — crone. I repeat, this is now, the harrowing recent ‘real’ world, but it is often stripped of reference. By not having context except that of one’s own experience, the reader may float in the language and its melodies. Presented as gift, after all.” **Alice Notley, Recipient of the Griffin Prize, the Ruth Lilley Poetry Prize **

“The magic of this book is that in a time of global suffering, its author ‘walked to the edge of an old and used up world and hummed a tune of invention.’ Brava!” Dante Micheaux author of “Circus,” winner of The Four Quartets Prize from The Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation

“A poet of radiant grace, Margo Berdeshevsky moves effortlessly across a vast range of associations in the world of ghosts, birds, hunger, words, and elements. These are poems of magnificent sensuality, full of strangeness, soulfulness, and healing.” **Valzhyna Mort, Recipient of the Griffin Prize **

“This is an incredibly beautiful and sentient book. Margo Berdeshevsky’s poetic rhythms are agile and incantatory, her imagery compelling, and her concerns consistently cogent, womanly, and universal.” **Cyrus Cassells, Poet Laureate of Texas and recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize **