Salmon Poetry – serie

"... 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.

"Notes wears its nerves on the surface, revealing a voice, or voices, which plunge to the edge of despair without falling prey to the merely personal... Yeats, Eliot, Dante, Blake, Schubert, Catullus, among others, are the resident ghosts in this delicate apparatus and yet Notes find its own serene voice in the midst of all those masters of silence. It is so because these poems are both personal and impersonal. They write with brutal candour about the heart of human fragility."Irish Literary SupplementPeter van de Kamp was born in The Hague, The Netherlands in 1956. He taught English and Anglo-Irish Literature, Rhetoric and Stylistics at the University of Leiden and University College, Dublin, where he was a Newman Scholar. He now teaches at the Institute of Technology, Tralee. A poet, translator, critic, anthologist and scholar, he has published extensively in Ireland, England, Europe and the States. In all, he has published 17 books. His second collection of poetry, In Train, was published by Salmon in 2007. He was also the founder of K.I.S.S., the Kerry International Summer School of Living Irish Authors.

The New Pornography, Patrick Chapman's second collection, takes the reader on a perverse and darkly humorous trip. America, viruses, a fear of falling satellites, the uterus as birthday present... a baby born backwards into the womb - this new collection takes as a starting point some of the themes of Chapman's acclaimed Jazztown, while exploring strange and wonderful new directions of its own. "Chapman's stylish and crafted pessimism assumes dominance. There is a linguistic bravery evident in these poems which augurs well for later work." The Irish Times"Particular poems are startling in their originality, humour and sparseness of language."The Irish EmigrantPatrick Chapman was born in 1968. His other poetry collections are Jazztown (Raven Arts Press, 1991) and Breaking Hearts & Traffic Lights (Salmon Poetry, 2008). He has also written a collection of short fiction, The Wow Signal (Bluechrome, 2007); an audio drama, Doctor Who: Fear of the Daleks (Big Finish, 2007); and an award-winning film, Burning the Bed (2003), which he adapted from his own published short story. Directed by Denis McArdle, the film stars Gina McKee and Aidan Gillen. In 2003, he won first prize in the story category of the Cinescape Genre Literary Contest. In 2006, he and Philip Casey founded the Irish Literary Revival website. He lives in Dublin.

"Tillinghast's poems range confidently among different cultures. He has a sense of history as a living force. The experiments in metre, rhyme and free verse in 'The Stonecutter's Hand' are important. He is a wonderfully gifted poet, one of the few." Louis Simpson"Of all the many complex, sometimes self-cancelling, tasks a poet must address, it may be that the most demanding and severe is getting things right. Richard Tillinghast performs that office with an honesty so strict that over and over his poems prove themselves faithful in ways that bring a quiet, undisputed delight." Anthony HechtToday in the Café Trieste brings together new and old work by Richard Tillinghast, author of five books of poetry published in the United States, including the critically acclaimed The Stonecutter's Hand. James Dickey called Tillinghast "the best poet of the younger generation, and deserving more recognition than most of the poets of the older generation..." His work stands out among contemporary poetry for its focus on history, and for the ease with which it moves back and forth between widely differing poetic idioms. In the early 90s Tillinghast lived for a year with his family in Kinvara, County Galway, and he continues to visit Ireland often. He frequently writes on books and travels for the New York Times.

In this her fourth collection of poetry, Jo Slade explores the fractured landscape of memories and meanings. These are poems of the journey; always moving forward and deeper into an essential truth that is her own individual voice. There is a shamanic quality to these poems, meaning and metaphor combine to create a unique music, a language sometimes tentative, that enables her to understand the complexity of meaning itself. Crossings are a necessary part of the journey. Sometimes risky, they require a kind of leap of faith, as in the act of poetry. But ultimately poetry sustains, even within the limitations of language, there is a way through to understanding.Jo Slade lives and works in Limerick. She is the author of three previous books of poetry: In Fields I Hear Them Sing (Salmon, 1989); The Vigilant One (Salmon, 1994) which was nominated for The Irish Times / Aer Lingus Literature Prize; and Certain Octobers (Editions Eireanna, Quimpeir France, 1997) which received a publication bursary from the Centre du Livre, Paris. She was Poet-in-Residence for Limerick County Council in 2002/2003. She was nominated in 2003 for the "Prix Evelyn Encelot" Ecriture Prize, Maison des Ecrivains, Paris. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, in Ireland and abroad.

In this far-reaching collection Maurice Harmon extends the examination of modern Irish life that he began twenty years ago. the mischievous boy exposes the conditions of life in Ireland through various manifestations - in James Joyce, Thomas Kinsella, and William Carleton. The transformed nature of Irish society is projected in the satirical 'A Vision of Ireland in the Twenty-first Century'. In a style of luminous simplicity Maurice Harmon gives us elegies, love poems and humorous asides, delicate evocations of love and loss, considerations of misunderstanding between fathers and sons, a discussion of the attraction between men and women against the stark background of wife-murder, and portrait poems of greedy politicians. Childhood innocence and zest for living are celebrated in the title poem that serves as a foil for the discoveries of pain, deceit, and uncertainty in later experience. In the concluding section, he considers human experience in Egypt, the Middle East, America and Japan.Maurice Harmon, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, is a distinguished critic, biographer, editor, literary historian, and poet. He has written studies of several Irish writers, including Seán O'Faoláin, Austin Clarke, and Thomas Kinsella and edited the ground-breaking anthology Irish Poetry After Yeats. His Selected Essays (2006) contains articles on William Carleton, Mary Lavin, John Montague, and contemporary Irish poetry. A study of Thomas Kinsella as poet and translator, Thomas Kinsella: Designing for the Exact Needs, was published in March 2008. His poetry collections include The Last Regatta (2000) and The Doll with Two Backs and Other Poems (2004). The title poem of The Mischievous Boy has been set to music by Derek Ball and is the subject of a stained glass window by Phyllis Burke.