Local Poetry
We try to keep a good selection of our local poets, from the famous Longley and Heaney, Muldoon, through to new and exciting voices such as Leontia Flynn and Emma McKervey. Please email and ask if you would like recommendations or something specific.
100 Poems, by Seamus Heaney (hardback and paperback available)
$23.00
An intimate curated set of poems from throughout Heaney’s life, chosen by his family.
Seamus Heaney had the idea to form a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, and no other edition exists which has such a broad range, drawing from first to last of his prize-winning collections. But now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family, curated some time after Heaney's death in 2013.
In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, as well as discovering new favourites. It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching out far and wide, now and for years to come.
Essential for the fan, or those discovering him for the first time.
Earth / Air / Water Kieran O’Malley ( pamphlets)
$7.00
Kieran Darragh O'Malley was born in Belfast in 1948, and attended Clongowes Wood College and later qualified in medicine at University College Dublin.. Spent 9 yrs at Univ. of Washington with Prof. Ann Streissguth in Fetal Alcohol and Drug Unit (1997-2006). Returned to Ireland in 2006, and now works as psychiatric consultant at Slievemore Clinic Dublin for pts. with developmental psychiatric disorders especially FASDS or NDPAE. Has been involved in clinical research on FASDS/NDPAE, lectured internationally, published 60/70 papers, 12 book chapters,4 books
He has had a parallel life,attending Drama School at 8yrs old in Lyric Players Theatre Belfast , founded by his parents Mary and Pearse O'Malley in 1951. He has directed 50 to 60 productions, been Artistic Director of 5 theatre companies, and more recently has published several poetry books.
He is married to artist Siobhan and between them they have 7 adult/ children living across the world.
This, Also, Is Mercy by Teresa Godfrey ( paperback, 2021, SIGNED)
$15.00
This, Also, Is Mercy begins with a moving and wonderfully detailed poem about the Titanic. One thinks one knows where that particular journey will end up, but Teresa Godfrey’s poems are never predictable, and ‘Omen’ sets us off on a voyage into the surprising and marvellous.
Before the book ends with ‘Covid Planting’, a poem that perfectly sums up 2020, we’re offered hard-hitting pieces, followed by a sequence of superb love poems and some treks through northern dreamscapes that move with cinematic deftness. There’s also a self-portrait that might not even be of the author, a little masterpiece of ekphrastic art. Energetic, caring, and wildly inventive, these are poems of a high order indeed. Theodore Deppe This, Also, Is Mercy is a meditation on connections. Teresa Godfrey knows that it is details that bring meaning to moments, and she describes them in elegant, musical language. The collection arcs through time, beginning with a (fortunately) failed emigration, and becomes a meditation on what stays.
The Sun Is Open, Gail McConnell ( paperback Sept 2021)
$13.00
The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life.
A truly innovative and moving book.
This is meticulous and painstaking - sometimes pain-making work - making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses. A series of ethical considerations and transactions, credits and debits that sometimes demand to be accounted for, or judged, or at least spoken of in the light of whatever the forensics might or might never unfold.' - Ciaran Carson
Poetry book of the month - the Observer
A TLS book of the year
The Slain Birds, Michael Longley ( paperback Sept 2022)
$16.00
Michael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas - 'for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing'.The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in 'Totem', which represents the book itself as 'a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures'.
'Slain birds' exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is 'the merlin we cannot see'. Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today.
Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious 'home' for the human family. It engenders 'Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry'. Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials: carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery.
This suggests the versatility with which he remakes his own art. Two granddaughters 'weave a web from coloured strings' and hang it up 'to trap a big idea'. The interlacing lyrics of The Slain Birds are such a web.
