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.
SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
Invisible Woman and Other Stories takes us on an intimate journey of ageing, from the shock of catching a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror as others see us to the actual slipping away of the self. The stories speak of reckonings: with the illness and death of a parent, with the emotional baggage that must be cleared out along with the material remains, with memories and missed opportunities, and with the waning of desire.
Shortlisted for the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development Literature Prize 2023.
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.
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.
ON THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
PANDEMIC
INTO THE GREAT OUTDOORS
MODERN TIMES
PORTFOLIO
and many others
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.
