Kelly Michels(The Gallery Press, 2024); £11.25, pbk Sean Scully’s oil and pastel on aluminium depiction of the American flag (‘Ghost Gun’) on the front cover of Kelly Michels’ debut collection, American Anthem, confronts and provokes its reader – the facile drawing of a gun swaddled in blood-tinged bandages in the box-section where the stars usually Read More
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin(The Gallery Press, 2023); pbk: €11.95 ‘Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.’ (Eavan Boland, A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming A Woman Poet) This is true of the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, poet, academic, translator and former Poetry Professor of Ireland now elected to the Read More
Ciarán Carson, one of this year’s contenders for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, has written over twenty works of poetry, memoir, translations and fiction. His poetry collections include Belfast Confetti (1990), which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry; First Language: Poems (1994), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and Breaking Read More
I wore out my youth first, and glad I did. How would My dress be newer now If I had played safer? (from Song of the Woman of Breare, translated by Ní Chuilleanáin), 9th Century Old Irish) The cover describes Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s “most recent excavation of memory and examination of time (and timelessness […]) Read More