ON THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
PANDEMIC
INTO THE GREAT OUTDOORS
MODERN TIMES
PORTFOLIO
and many others
Ten years after the Independence Referendum, Irish Pages asks diverse Scottish writers of distinction – established, mid-career and new – to think about their country, and take stock of the current state of its culture and polity, language and literature, ecology and environment, while a specially curated selection of Scotland’s emerging poets will offer a younger perspective. How will Scotland fare in an era of momentous and unpredictable political change? Stands Scotland where it did?
Co-edited by Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson.
“The Genocide Issue” is a unique and compelling compendium of writing of great variety of the highest contemporary and historical relevance (for obvious reasons) with a likely huge appeal. It is divided into five sections: “Documents”, “Gaza”, “The Balkans”, “The Holocaust”, and “Indigenous Peoples”, with a major translation section “In Other Words” from the Turkish. With an outstanding range of major poets, writers, scholars and journalists from Ireland and Britain, as well as from across the globe, it also tracks the palpable swerve towards new authoritarian and totalitarian norms in nominally democratic countries.
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.
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.
