Wake Forest University Press – förlag

The Magpie and the Child tells a story of great loss, love, and learning. The volume starts from the days before the poetic journey, in a sort of pre-exploration of events before they were events, moving to and through the death of her child Emily at almost eleven years old from an unsuspected heart condition. The poems speak, lament, and sing among the metaphors and religious resonances that such mourning must inspire. The thieving magpie of the prefatory title poem pecks at its own image in the glass while the poet daubs the hope of intervening blood on the “trembling lintel of faith.” The volume is filled with self-examination, suffering, remembered conversations with the living child, and very real ones with the dead, each of which record the steps of the emotional journey. The second half of The Magpie and the Child is an extended sequence taking the form of a fragmented diary, one that captures the pain of loss in a skeptical age yet insists on the ritual compensation of belief. In the rigors of its form, the depth of its despair, and the necessary belief in the meaning of its artistic act, Clutterbuck’s poetry carefully and beautifully maintains this very delicate balance.

True voices abound in The Meek, Martin Dyar s second full-length collection of poems, throughout which a dramatically charged lyricism links environmental understanding with an emotive exploration of human experience and potential. The Meek is distinguished by the resonance and range of its stories, by its closeness to elemental landscape and wildlife, and by its moments of unforgettable insight and beauty. In one poem, A Lockdown Fox, The whole street felt acknowledged by the earth and longed for more. Elsewhere, in A Merlin in the Sheeffrys, There is a feeling that is equal to the land, / a sense of self that is the journey s length. And in the title sonnet, a powerful consideration of animal rights, one of Dyar s bruised and enigmatic characters arrives at a cold acceptance of nature s cold view / that all of life is love misunderstood.

Where Love and Imagination Colour the Dark establishes a broad interdisciplinary context in which to consider the work of Thomas Kinsella, one of the most significant poets in modern Irish and international poetry. This collection of twelve essays by some of the finest poets and scholars of contemporary Irish poetry provides a detailed reading of the themes and forms throughout Kinsella’ s remarkable career. Beginning with several chapters devoted to assessing the aesthetic importance of Kinsella’ s native Dublin, this volume traces the evolution of the poet’ s work from the early formalism of the 1950s through the Jungian-inspired explorations of the psyche, his fascination with personal origins and Irish mythology, and the open-ended sequences that characterized his mature poetry. The central role of Kinsella’ s Peppercanister Press from both a creative and artistic perspective is also explored, as is the fundamental importance of Kinsella’ s wife Eleanor, his partner and Muse for more than sixty years.

From his first collection in 1992, Gerard Fanning established himself, in the words of Gerard Smyth, as a poet enduring “ almost by stealth … forging a distinctive style that is striking for its originality.” With understated formal elegance, Fanning’ s poetry has the cool and control of the Hollywood westerns he admired, dense with allusions to American music and contemporary cinema, and equally attentive to Ireland’ s eastern and western seascapes. These are poems which welcome and reward investigation, “ where hymn is an amalgam of flutter and whisper, where rhymes / fall in with their echo.” This Collected Poems gathers the four books Gerard Fanning published during his lifetime— Easter Snow (1992), Working for the Government (1999), Water & Power (2004), and Hombre: New and Selected Poems (2011)— along with his final, unpublished collection, Slip Road, completed shortly before his death in 2017 and published here for the first time. Edited by Fanning’ s wife Brí d Ní Chuilinn and poet / novelist Conor O’ Callaghan, this collection includes contributions from Gerald Dawe and Colm Tó ibí n, Fanning’ s contemporaries and friends, offering key insights for this remarkable body of work.