CIARÁN O’ROURKE
Longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2023
With lyric grace and meditative clarity, Phantom Gang offers a daring dissection of civilizational violence in a variety of contexts – from the intimate atavisms and inequalities of Irish history to the insidious growth of the global Big Tech economy in the present day – alongside deep, sensually delicate explorations of broken love and salvaged memories.
IGOR ŠTIKS
Igor Štiks’ fourth novel, mysteriously titled with only one letter, W, is his most elaborate so far – and definitely his most exciting – a feat of storytelling in which historic tragedies are woven through with humour and erotic passion.
JOHN F. DEANE & JAMES HARPUR
John F. Deane and James Harpur have devoted their lives to writing about the mysteries of existence and the divine. This selection of their poems displays how each poet has probed and described his journey in search of ultimate truth.
LUKA BEKAVAC
August After Midnight is a Croatian novel about memory, trauma and transcommunication: a triptych of different voices, weaving together historiography, speculative fiction and highly stylized prose.
GARRY MACKENZIE
The author, Garry MacKenzie, writes of this book:
“My book-length poem draws on the work of an eighteenth-century Gaelic poem by Duncan Bàn MacIntyre, rendering it into English. Where it does so, this is not to present MacIntyre’s poetry per se to an English-language reader, as is customary with a translation or version. Instead, the sections of Ben Dorain which draw upon MacIntyre’s poem incorporate that earlier work into a whole which is completely new. MacIntyre’s work is always in conversation with (and frequently contradicted by) lines which do not derive from him and which bring in contemporary ideas about ecology, land use, environmentalism, music, mythology, queer theory, and diverse cultural histories not to be found in the Gaelic poem. MacIntyre’s lines are never unfiltered by contemporary thought or commentary. My approach was to create a new, multifaceted, ecological poem, rather than simply to render a Gaelic poem into English so that it is available to a wider readership. For that reason I describe the poem not as a translation or version, but as a creative conversation.”
PATRICIA CRAIG
This long-awaited selection of essays and reviews from one of Ireland’s leading critics brings together a wealth of reflection, observation and astute literary comment. It ranges in time from William Carleton to Edna O’Brien, and in subject matter from recent Irish poetry to ghosts, children’s books and MI5.
CHRIS AGEE
Caustically humorous and polemically compulsive, Trump Rant is a work of meticulous political portraiture: a deep-delving and epoch-spanning investigation into the nature of power in American life, made luminous by Chris Agee’s nuanced, exploratory understanding of authoritarian drift and thwarted democratic aspiration in a number of world-historical contexts, from Belfast to the Balkans to the formerly Confederate South. Free-roaming in its breadth of reference and tonal range, the Rant is at once viscerally personal and unsettlingly resonant, infused throughout with an almost hypnotic sense of scale, largesse, and historical moment.
CIARÁN O’ROURKE
The Buried Breath announces the arrival of a striking new voice and poetic talent. With formal ease and a sharply engaged sense of ethical inquiry, these lucid, lyrical poems delve into art and history, remembered lives and contemporary conflicts, for illumination and insight. Featuring vivid portrayals of love, desire, grief, and mourning, the collection is hauntingly sensitive to time’s passage, and to the sometimes fragile solaces of its craft – as its supple translations from Catullus, Virgil, and Machado, and its sensually immersive array of ekphrastic pieces attest.
CATHAL Ó SEARCAIGH
Crann na Teanga/The Language Tree is a collection that enriches our understanding of the turbulent times we live in. In this long “life in poetry” (books from 1975 to the present), Ó Searcaigh is lifted emotionally and imaginatively beyond his own life into the life of all, into our common cosmic existence.
CHRIS AGEE
A decade after Next to Nothing, Chris Agee’s critically acclaimed and achingly powerful collection of poems in memory of his daughter Miriam, Blue Sandbar Moon explores with delicate precision the emotional and spiritual landscape of a life sustained in “the aftermath of aftermath.” Consisting mainly of 174 untitled, interconnected short poems, the collection evolves with technical grace and meditative clarity to present a holistic and searching vision of worlds in motion – both public and private, natural and imagined, the seen and the sensed.
HUBERT BUTLER
Butler’s essays do not just give insight into past events, but also into the past perceptions of those events. They are not just the story of one era, but of the self-perception of that era as well. His essays are a kind of time-capsule, and their moral attitude has an everlasting timeless quality.
AN INTRODUCTION TO IRISH, SCOTS GAELIC AND SCOTS IN ULSTER AND SCOTLAND
Funded by generous Irish-British grants from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Foras na Gaeilge, the Ulster-Scots Agency, Comcille, Bord na Gàidhlig and the Gaelic Books Council in Scotland, The Other Tongues is a beautifully-produced, ground-breaking and major anthology in a coffee-table-book format, aimed at the general reader in English as well as in Irish, Scots Gaelic and Scots.
EDITED BY H.L. HIX
The first major anthology of contemporary American poetry ever to be published in Ireland, New Voices brings together thirty distinguished younger poets (born between 1966 and 1982) in a selection of work characterized by an unusual range and depth of thematic concerns, stylistic procedures and authorial identities.
