Next to Nothing by Chris Agee – Irish Times review 11th April 2009
Next to love, grief is the great enabler of poems. In many ways grief is more powerful than love, whether in fiction or poetry. Love, especially if it is a happy collaboration between adults, excludes us from its golden circle even as readers, whereas grief, with its sense of crisis and abandonment, ignites our sense of humanity and calls us to become a part of its urgent business. In this, his latest collection of poems, the American born, Belfast-based poet, Chris Agee, has created a compelling, grief-stricken narrative. Death has become his ghostly collaborator, overwhelming in its agency and effect, darkening the poet’s language and hoisting his talent upon an aesthetic gurney where it is tested, prodded and dismembered…