DAVID BYERS
In 1792 the Harpers’ Meeting in Belfast was indeed an important event in the history and life of the town. Belfast’s reformers and radicals desired a better future, but they also shared an interest in the past. Through their support for the few surviving harpers, they hoped future generations might benefit from the survival of a tradition and an instrument, music, language, and practises that were all fast disappearing.
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.
A week-to-view diary, this elegant and practical publication gathers extracts from twenty years of outstanding writing from Irish Pages (the island’s premier literary journal) and The Irish Pages Press. With an array of distinguished Irish and international authors, The 2024 Irish Pages Literary Diary is an essential holiday gift for readers, writers, and anyone interested in the life of the mind and the state of the world.
The Diary features classic texts by celebrated authors such as Kathleen Jamie, Susan Sontag, Patricia Craig, Slavenka Drakulić, Julia Kristeva and Chinua Achebe, as well as the remarkable work of emerging writers living in Ireland. The Diary includes quotations in English, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Irish, highlighting the linguistic range across Ireland and Britain.
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.
IVANA SAJKO
The Story of a Man Who Collapsed Into His Notebook is about departures, childhood, the end of a relationship and the vanishing possibility in today’s world of fleeing to a better place. Written in the first person, each chapter a single sentence, the novel is an internal soliloquy of self-examination, an excavation of a life punctuated by upheaval and loss, hope and disillusionment, ambition and failure.
DINO PEŠUT
Croatia’s Groundbreaking Gay Novel.
“I receive the news of my father’s grave illness with almost complete indifference. I’m finding it mildly annoying, like road construction… He called me just briefly; he doesn’t want to bother me too much. I’m at work right now. I hang up. I’m furious at my father’s potentially terminal illness. I work at the reception desk of an okay hotel… My job is not demanding—often it’s boring, but it keeps my curiosity alive. I especially like working the evening shifts and figuring out who is sleeping with whom. At night, I get to read a lot. Secretly, I write poetry.”
60 LYRICS FRAE THE CHINESE:Translations in Scots and English
BRIAN HOLTON
Brian Holton is unique in that he can translate directly into Scots from the Chinese. This anthology consists of translations into Scots and English of the first sixty poems of the standard anthology Song Ci Sanbaishou (“300 Sòng Dynasty Song Lyrics”), edited by Zhu Zumou (1924), with a Translator’s Afterword/Owresetter’s Eftirword.
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.
SONGS AND POEMS:Translated from the Greek
CHRIS PREDDLE
Here are Sappho’s songs and poems as English poems, all her famous pieces, all the fragments that can make connected sense, and all the discoveries of 2004 and 2014. These translations set out to be good English poetry first and foremost, and succeed well beyond other current versions. They have been made directly from Sappho’s Greek, by a poet with three collections to his credit, and are relatively close to the Greek. Each piece has a concise footnote that explains references and allusions, and suggests critical appreciation. A substantial Afterword says much more about Sappho’s themes, her art and style, and her historical setting.
SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
It is 1914, the eve of the First World War. Mileva Einstein has just arrived in Berlin with her two young sons to join her husband, the most celebrated scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein. He has finally found a university position worthy of his talents.
And then Mileva then receives a letter from him outlining “Conditions” he expects her to uphold in order to continue their relationship, and her already difficult life is completely upended.
IVANA ŠOJAT
The novel Unterstadt tells the story of an urban family of German origin living in Osijek from the end of the nineteenth till the end of the twentieth century. It is narrated through the portrayal of the destinies of four generations of women – a great grandmother, a grandmother, mother, and a daughter – their shattered illusions, the education of their children, the historical events that brutally lash out at them.
NEBOJŠA LUJANOVIĆ
When a fire at Zagreb’s Three Palms café tragically takes the life of the owner’s son, everyone joins the search for a culprit. And there can only be one: the young Roma man – Enis – employed as a waiter at the café.
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.”
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.
GERARD McCARTHY
This is the first book of essays by a major new Irish non-fiction writer from the West of Ireland, comparable to the celebrated Kilkenny essayist Hubert Butler first published by The Lilliput Press and subsequently widely acclaimed. McCarthy’s writing is no less distinguished than Butler’s.
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.
