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.

GARRY MACKENZIE

Firth is a poetic portrait of the Firth of Forth. It reaches back into the deep geological past and forward into a troubled future of pollution and extinction, via the boom and bust of the nineteenth-century fishing industry. At that time, government advisors recommended against regulating fishing in the Forth estuary, despite the wishes of fishermen who feared the fish population would be decimated without restrictions on trawling. Within a few decades the teeming waters of the Forth were denuded and the local fishing industry collapsed. The poems at the centre of Firth follow this ecological parable as it unfolds, although the story of the Forth told here covers a vaster timescale.

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.