100 Poems, by Seamus Heaney (hardback and paperback available)

£18.99

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.

 


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Orisons In the Dark, Pallavi Parma-Uday ( hardback May 2023)

£10.00

A beautifully produced collection of poems, recognising what it is to be a woman, a daughter, a traveller, an immigrant, a creative in today's multi cultural world. 

Pallavi is now living in Belfast, having grown up in various parts of India and worked in London before moving here. 

She is a graduate of LSE and is currently an economic historian in Queens University Belfast. 

( www.econhistorienne.com) 

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Michael Longley, The Candlelight Master ( poetry, 2020)

£10.00

The title poem sums up the chiaroscuro of this collection, named after a mysterious Baroque painter.

Other poems about painters - Matisse, Bonnard - imply that age makes the quest for artistic perfection all the more vital. A poem addressed to the eighth-century Japanese poet, Otomo Yakamochi, says: 'We gaze on our soul-landscapes / More intensely with every year.' The soul-landscape of The Candlelight Master is often a landscape of memory. But if Longley looks back over formative experiences, and over the forms he has given them, he channels memory into freshly fluid structures.

His new poems about war and the Holocaust speak to our own dark times. Translation brings dead poets up to date too. The bawdy of Catullus becomes Scots 'Hochmagandy'.

Yakamochi and the lyric poets of Ancient Greece find themselves at home in Longley's Carrigskeewaun.
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UP LATE, Nick Laird ( hardback July 2023)

£14.99

Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. At the book's heart lies the title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying, the reverberations of which echo throughout in poems that interrogate inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retrieved. Laird is a poet capable of heading off in any and every direction, where layers of association transport us from a clifftop in County Cork to the library steps in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a Kilburn garden.

There is conflation and conflagration, rage and fire, neither of which are seen as necessarily destructive. But there is great tenderness, too, a fondness for what grows between the cracks, especially those glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, before the knowledge or accumulation of loss, where everything is still at stake and infinite, 'the darkness under the cattle grid'.

Nick is orginally from Northern Ireland and is married to novelist Zadie Smith. 

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Taking liberties, Leontia Flynn ( paperback August 2023)

£12.00

These poems emerge from the experience of being a single mother in Belfast, and against a background of seemingly continuous crisis. Political upheaval and anxiety, violence and death are all registered in these poems, which ask questions about where independence is balanced by our relationships with others, and where our inner lives meet the globally connected world.

These are poems about cities - living, travelling and working in cities, getting sick and dying in cities - but also about retreating from all that: to her daughter at home, the budgie, cat and tortoise, or escaping to the park, the municipal pool, the Irish countryside, Newfoundland, or Paris, or into a Nina Simone song.

This is a necessary book - a book very much of our time - with a consistent tone that is brave and bleak, but which also carries with it some much-needed humour, and a wealth of beautiful writing.

Everyone should be reading her' OBSERVER

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This, Also, Is Mercy by Teresa Godfrey ( paperback, 2021, SIGNED)

£10.99

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.

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The Slain Birds, Michael Longley ( paperback Sept 2022)

£12.00

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.
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