Search results for ""Carcanet Press Ltd""

Dissects modern life and relationships with insouciant honesty and ruthless wit, and love poems that evoke feelings with. This book includes an extract from the opening chapter of the author's second psychological thriller, "Hurting Distance".

Read more less

A collection about war and its human cost by exiled Iraqi poet and a former literary editor of the "Baghdad Observer".

Read more less

A new and updated version of the 'Collected Poems of Eavan Boland', Ireland's pioneering premier female poet.

Read more less

'Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes. Or does it?' At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the painter Jan Gossaert paints Danae, upon whom Jupiter descends in a shower of gold, as a plump nubile maiden, her face haunted, one heavy breast exposed. In a nineteenth-century asylum in Zurich, a woman writes endlessly to her husband, covering the same page over and over again until nothing is legible. In January 1947, Arnold Schoenberg suffers a heart attack. Brought back to life by means of injections to his heart, he writes his astonishing string trio, "Opus 45", shortly afterwards. The French poet, Francis Ponge is photographed standing at a window, looking out through a broken pane. Behind him, there is an empty room, devoid of furniture. Out of fragments of cultural history from the past four hundred years, Gabriel Josipovici has created a compressed, poetic narrative of solitude, love, illness and the ambiguous comforts of art. As clear and elusive as the arts it explores, this is the most beautiful and mysterious of Josipovici's books to date.

Read more less

Togara Muzanenhamo's first collection of poems evokes a number of worlds, familiar and unfamiliar. He takes us from his vivid, vanished childhood in Zimbabwe to Europe, where he lived for some years, making as he goes the stories and connections that coax a meaning out of time and change. These are less poems of memory than of creation. There exists a fractured world, partly hidden from the poet, in which dream makes a different kind of order. This unpredictable, parallel world provides an undertone, a treacherous reflection. "Spirit Brides" combines the real and the surreal, stone and steel on the one hand, and air on the other. The plains of the veldt in Zimbabwe are as tangible as the bookstore in Antwerp or the bottle-shop in Paris. There is a language here that fills some of the troubling silences of our time, that engages death, violence and, most particularly, love.

Read more less

"Ice Memory" is the first book of poems by the German poet Joachim Sartorius to be published in English. A traveller between continents, cultures and eras, Sartorius is a poet of global reach, whose poems, full of sound and light, documenting the wealth and exhaustion of the world, are magnificently brought into English by translators from Australia, Britain and the United States. In memories and ruins, Joachim Sartorius shows how bridges can be built in a fragmented world. The book includes translations by Richard Dove, Robert Gray, Michael Hamburger, Michael Hulse, Christopher Middleton, Sibylle Schlsier, Andrew Shields, Nathaniel Tarn, and Rosmarie Waldorp.

Read more less

In her third book of poems, Sinead Morrissey builds on the achievement of her award-winning collection, "Between Here and There", by expanding the lyric into new territories and admitting new voices. The theme of imprisonment is variously addressed: in the actual prisons of eighteenth-century Europe; in the prison of our own limited perceptions of experience, particularly of other cultures when abroad; in the prison of the mortal human body itself. Alongside the intimate interiors of human relationships, the poems are also interested in broader discourses, particularly history, and range in scope from the Royalist convictions of a woman wearing a Scold's Bridle during England's interregnum, to the story of the number zero. Form and content, as well as the personal and the political, are blended throughout this collection with imagination and consummate skill. As in her previous two books, travel remains a source of inspiration: one exhilarating poem details, in nine 'chapters', a six-thousand-mile train journey across China in which the conflicting faces of a rapidly changing country jostle for space.The collection ends with a compelling act of ventriloquism, as Morrissey recounts, in the first person, the life and works of the great prison reformer John Howard, and details his vision for the moral regeneration of the corrupted human soul.

Read more less

Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be "good Europeans", avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-century. Yet as RG Collingwood observed in his last great inquiry into the nature of civilisation, a book written to the glory of Hobbes at the height of the London blitz, Nietzsche was himself a victim of the disease he diagnosed. In "The Good European" Iain Bamforth reports on fifteen years of "experimental living" during which his attachment to the old continent brought him from Berlin, in the week in which he saw the fall of the Wall in 1989, to Strasburg, heart of aboriginal Europe and the city of noses in "Tristram Shandy". Thrown into a deep identity crisis by Bismarck's victories against the French in 1870, pilot region for some of the modern state's most radical policies (health insurance, public relations), Alsace's divided loyalties have affected the nature of Europe itself. With his ear attuned to the complexities of culture and politics, Bamforth attempts to discover Europe through extra-diplomatic channels: he offers essays on writers and thinkers who have done much to define the small archipelago on the edge of Asia, including classics such as Kleist, Kafka, Roth and Benjamin, WG Sebald and Mavis Gallant. He provides a portrait of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a send-off for Bernard Pivot's classic literary chat-show "Bouillon de Culture", a scrutiny of philosophising media pundit Peter Sloterdijk, landscapes from Provence and Bavaria, reports from Prague and Geneva, Franco-German shibboleths, a sarcastic letter from 'Kakania', and an anatomy of the Alsatian humorist Tomi Ungerer. Europe often reeks of the terminally nostalgic and the curatorial: here a sceptical Scots intelligence reaches out to Musil, Heine, Gogol, Sterne, Montaigne, Rabelais and beyond the 'standard average European' to the gallant, helpless, hero-smitten Don, in the hope that they can help him find the way towards a more generous Europe.

Read more less

Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun. This collection includes all the favourite nonsense poems. Peter Swaab sets them alongside a generous selection from Lear's six travel books (including his three Journals of a Landscape Painter), first published between 1841 and 1870, and long out of print. For the first time Lear is presented as an adventurer, not only in the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, but also in nineteenth-century Albania, Greece, Calabria and Corsica, where his encounters with the people and customs of these sometimes equally strange and challenging cultures are recorded with the same acute and rueful comic imagination.

Read more less

Sir Walter Scott is the great poet of the Scottish people, their history and land, yet he wrote at a time when Scottish culture and landscapes were changing rapidly under English pressure. Introducing this selection, James Reed, an authority on ballads and the Border tradition, sets Scott in context as both a European Romantic and a Scottish folk poet. He also illuminates the political and cultural context of his work. This selection, which includes early love poems, songs from the novels, landscape poems from "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "The Lady of the Lake", and the complete narrative poems "William and Helen" and "Marmion", reveals Scott as a poet who speaks for a people. The selection contains notes on the text, suggestions for further reading and a glossary.

Read more less

'Author of paradoxes as clear as water and, as water, dizzying ...mysterious man who does not cultivate mystery, mysterious as the mid-day moon, taciturn phantom of the Portuguese mid-day - who is Pessoa?' asks Octavio Paz. This collection of the work of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) answers that question. It is an essential introduction to the work of one of the most original European poets of the twentieth century. It includes translations of a broad selection of his poems and his extraordinary prose, and some of his original English writings. A major introductory essay by Octavio Paz, a critical anthology, two posthumous 'interviews' and illustrations from the Pessoa archive are also included, to reveal the world of Pessoa in all its richness.

Read more less

It is William Tyndale who gave the English people their first New Testament, translated from the original Greek, and half of the Old Testament, from the original Hebrew. This is a collection of his work.

Read more less

The prize-winning Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag has one of the most distinctive and subtle voices in contemporary German-language writing. Among her most recent poems are the Summer Elegies, published to much acclaim in Austria in 2002. These, with selections from her earlier work, are included, with an introduction by Karen Leeder and a full interview with the poet. Schlag uses the term 'elegy' in the same spirit as Ovid does; it is a mode which includes the themes of love, of place, and of the passing of time and the urgencies it induces. Schlag has developed a rapid, nuanced, unpunctuated style which involves the reader in various creative ways. Her world is as emotionally opulent as her beloved Tsvetaeva's, with whom she shares an impatience with faint-hearted love, and her tones can be as volatile and various as hers. Most of her poems secrete narratives, and those narratives are linked to her life in its widest sense. Her landscapes and the creatures, human and otherwise, that inhabit them are unforgettable.

Read more less

This selection from the most productive Christian pen of the 19th century is also an introduction to one of its most compelling and troubled minds. John Henry Newman (1801-1891) was a dominant figure in both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic churches. His writings and his human presence in Oxford and elsewhere had an abiding impact on both communions and contribute still to the spirit of ecumenicism. This bok concentrates on Newman's life and work up to 9 October 1845, the mid-point of his life and the moment be became a Roman Catholic. He was a prolific and subtle writer, a great prose artist whose sermons, tracts and polemics, together with a talent for organization and an ability to inspire others to faith and action, launched the Oxford Movement and the controversies that still follow from it. The 12 years between 1833 and 1845 are among the most important for English Christianity, and they were shaped for the most part by the pen and energy of Newman, a rather shy, quiet Oxford don, whose enduring legacy was to restore to the Church of England its Catholic heritage. Newman was complex and sometimes contradictory as a man, and even in his most formal writings the man is present, responding to social and political pressures of church and state. A great communicator, with a need for self-disclosure, he is nonetheless revealed "and" concealed in his writings.

Read more less

A collection of poems produced by Brian Cox since his retirement as a Manchester professor, which portray scenes from his own life and convey a sense of ending and losing a role.

Read more less

In this collection, Jon Stallworthy and Peter France introduce Blok's poetry into English, retaining as much as possible his distinctive form and tone. His early poetry is inspired by mystical experience, and the Beautiful Lady in his work is less a conceit than a powerful enabler.

Read more less

Thomas Blackburn was a haunted and difficult man. His childhood was tormented by an obsessive father (an Anglican priest of Mauritian descent) who scoured his face with peroxide to lighten his skin colour, and an overaffectionate mother. The moral and sexual uncertainties of this period were to form the core of his later poetry and prose. Influenced by Yeats, his work in the Fifties and Sixties dramatized the conflict between faith and sexuality, drawing on myth, Christian imagery and Jungian tropes, he produced a spare and challenging body of work. Although his life was interrupted by bouts of alcoholism and ill health, he continued writing through the early Seventies, his work becoming more intimate and confessional. He was an influential teacher and friend of many artists in London during the 1950s and 1960s, his daughter recalling a scene in which her father, wearing a white linen suite, danced cheek to cheek with a black leather-clad Francis Bacon.

Read more less

Combining traditional forms and those associated with modernism, this collection focuses on love, loss, and the different ways in which people - for better or worse - can be significant to each other.

Read more less

First selection of Andrew Young's best-known short poems and the long mystical poem Into Hades. The volume is illustrated by Joan Hassalal's powerful wood-engravings.

Read more less

This volume of verse by Jane Austen and her family contains all the known poems by Jane herself and a selection of work by her sister Cassandra, four of her brothers, her uncle James, her nieces Anna and Fanny, and her nephew James Edward.

Read more less

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is best known to Anglophone readers as the author of A Hero of Our Time, whereas among Russian readers his poetry is equally cherished. Lermontov was of Scottish descent, and this bilingual volume celebrates his bicentenary with new translations by 14 translator-poets, mostly Scottish.

Read more less

The latest novel by acclaimed writer Gabriel Josipovici, encompassing suspense, love, family and the work of the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell.

Read more less

An accessible gathering of work by New Zealand's foremost poet.

Read more less

A gathering of work by one of Britain's most vital and well-established poets.

Read more less

A colourful new collection by one of the outstanding Caribbean poets of our time.

Read more less

Small World tells a story of the changing relationship between a father and his two daughters, one severely disabled, a 'mermaid in a wheelchair', the other discovering the difference of her elder sister, the 'moon' to her 'earth'. Each succeeding poem gathers further telling detail as the father listens and observes with affection and surprise the strange world they inhabit, gradually reflecting on his own contrasting childhood. Finally, the book ends with a shock experience that brings all that has gone before into sharp focus.

Read more less

The Selected Poems of one of America's most eminent poets.

Read more less

New Selected Poems is a poet's choice of over thirty years' work. Minhinnick's poetry explores the complexities of belonging in the world. It is rooted in the rich particularity of industrial south Wales and the Welsh seaside resort in which he now lives, but its scope is global. New Selected Poems includes 'An Opera in Baghdad' as well as translations from six modern Welsh language poets; it mourns the ancient, savaged landscape of Iraq and listens to primeval echoes in the Welsh landscape; it celebrates the rhythms of the Americas. For Minhinnick, people, relationships and landscapes interconnect. The poetry that is true to that world is both lyrical and highly political.

Read more less

Zig Zag consists of five new sequences by Anthony Rudolf, a poet whose craft has been enriched by his experiences as a translator of French and Russian literature. Poems about memory, time and loss are complicated by humour, lyricism and a light touch.

Read more less

With the economy of a proverb and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence Raptors depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grotesque and pathetic. Tellegen's mercurial imagination evokes the dark archetypes of European folklore and reanimates them with a sophisticated sense of the endless fluidity of relationships, the instability of interpretation. An improvisation on a theme, circling back to 'my father' at the start of each poem, Raptors builds to a story without narrative, its extravagant imaginative leaps into absurdity held within a framework of tender observation. Toon Tellegen's translator Judith Wilkinson has worked closely with the poet to create English poems that capture the startling clarity and inventiveness of the original Dutch. Raptors has the rewarding intensity of a modern classic.

Read more less

'Rough music' is the old English name for a custom of public scapegoating. This is a book full of disturbing musical echoes, in which brilliant renewals of carol, charm, folksong and ballad explore themes of violence, loss and belonging. Fiona Sampson's characteristic lyric intensity deftly fuses metaphysics and politics with the vernacular of daily life.

Read more less

Multi-award-winning poet Capildeo's new collection brings home the delight, frustration, restlessness and continuity of striving to live a connected human life in our fragmenting times.

Read more less

These poems are apocalyptic and sensory, coming from a place of hurt and love, of the human spirit struggling to transcend 'base matter' and make sense of the world.

Read more less

The highly anticipated second collection from the winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022.

Read more less

The March-April 2023 issue An issue of dialogues, with whales, with Rimbaud, with Mexico, Afghanistan, Germany, Canada, with John Lucas, D.H. Lawrence and many more Includes new poems by Colm Tóibín, Claudine Toutoungi, Parwana Fayyaz, Stav Poleg and others Anthony Vahni Capildeo 'Touch and Mourning' Zohar Atkins 'Are Philosophers Normal?' New to PN Review this issue: Fabio Morabito, Sarah Mnatzaganian, Mark Haworth-Booth and Maithreyi Karnoor and more...

Read more less

In 1878, in London, a woman served a prison sentence for deserting two of her children, a charge she denied. Almost nothing else is known of her life or that of her husband, a dealer in 'foreign birds and curiosities', who was himself a migrant. The two children vanished from the record. This is where Fleet begins, with elusive histories and lost voices. The title suggests imperial power, conquest, traffic in commodities (which in the nineteenth century included vast numbers of exotic birds). It is shadowed by other meanings: the fleeting glimpse and swift flight; floating memories, enigmatic and insistent. Judith Willson's second book of poems was written during years when migration and displacement have become central facts of the human condition. The collection works outwards from found text – historical documents, archive materials – into other places and times. In the silences of such records, their erasures and omissions, are stories that haunt our present.

Read more less

The poems in The Gifts of Fortune, Peter McDonald's seventh book of poems, cover a spectrum of personal history. They go to Belfast, Oxford, and further afield; in time they visit the poet's pasts, his now, his possible futures. Autobiographical detail abounds: McDonald's experiences (as a workingclass boy in Belfast, who dreams of leaving, and a middleaged Oxford don, who dreams of going back) are filtered through a deep instinct for poetic tradition. At the heart of the book are two sequences: one, 'Mud', in which family, professional, and literary histories are combined in strictly formal, but personally unguarded, reflections on poetry, class, and privilege; and another, 'Blindness', where a series of tenline units test poetic form to (and beyond) breaking-point, in a meditation on family and suffering, disappointment and hope. Other poems return to themes of wealth and poverty, love and loss, and the alienation and puzzlement of age. Throughout the book, form is ghosted by the formless, hovering just beyond the frame; and Fortune vies with Fate, quite another force.

Read more less

Elegy turns into affirmation, `binding the pulse / back into the body’, in this new collection by Eric Gregory Award-winning poet Roger Garfitt. Roger Garfitt has published sparingly but always to good effect. The Action reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence, `written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pace of craft allows’. Carol Ann Duffy observed in The Guardian that `he clearly believes, quite rightly, in the Muse and his approach has the patience of a journeyman’s to his craft’. Hard-won, but not austere, the poems are marked by tenderness and passion; quiet humour rather than irony runs through them. Sean O’Brien writes, `He is both a meticulous re-creator of, for example, the effects of light, and a sociable poet who sees place as expressive of its inhabitants… The minuteness of his attention is often rewarding… an intriguing counterpart to the more public work of Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison.’

Read more less

`Death is a many-colored harlequin,’ Stanley Moss affirmed on his ninety-second birthday. Rosanna Warren writes of his latest poems, `Undaunted, outrageously alive, Moss flaunts more colors than the Grim Reaper ever dreamed of, laughs in his face, rhymes with abandon, makes a joyful noise unto the Lord, and struts with Baudelaire. This is a book to hold onto for dear life.’ And dear life is what Moss’s poetry has always been about, asking what John Ashbery called `unthinkable questions, but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight.’ Stanley Moss has been part of the American and European scene for seven decades: a defining editor of world poetry, he is a major poet of the generation of Ashbery, Merwin, Wright and Kinnell. This book richly supplements his Almost Complete Poems (Carcanet, 2017) with recovered writings and new-minted poems that address the monsters of the age while celebrating its angels.

Read more less

Following his acclaimed Pandemonium, Thomas McCarthy’s Prophecy dwells on childhood memory, romantic love and the varieties of human attachment. Still embodying his distinctive voice and craft, in these poems McCarthy risks more prophetic moods and themes. There are poems on illness and recovery, ageing and creativity. From the community well of his childhood home in County Waterford to the holy well and pilgrim site of St Gobnait’s in County Cork, the poet finds that the act of remembering is an act of making and understanding. `All this / Metaphor and trauma and formal technique / I place in my canvas travel bag’, he writes, beginning his poetic journeys into formal Irish Gardens of Remembrance, field hospitals of the great War, the 1970s university campus of Iowa. `Along with Paul Muldoon,’ suggested Dennis O’Driscoll, McCarthy is `the most important Irish poet of his generation.’

Read more less

To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and served in France and Flanders. This selection of his poems includes a substantial sampler of his war verse (the last poem he wrote was on revisiting the battlefields of the Somme). And yet, it is not easy to draw a line between the poems on war and those on other subjects, so deeply did his wartime experience suffuse and haunt his writing. Memories of what was `shrieking, dumb, defiled’ constantly test a vision of `faith, life, virtue in the sun’. Here is a poet of range and depth deserving of rediscovery.

Read more less

The Collected Poems (Second Impression) of Jamaica's Poet Laureate (2017-2020) and winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2019. Lorna Goodison is a poet alive to places, from the loved and lived-in world of Jamaica where she began and started a family, to the United States and Canada where she has made her teaching career, but always re-connecting with her Caribbean roots. She travels with an ear alert to histories and voices. How differently English sounds in the tropics and in colder lands, at seaside in sunlight and on prairies, mountains and in cities. The same words say quite different things, depending on who speaks them and who's listening, obeying or resisting. She covers a wide range of subjects and themes, too. Her instinct is to celebrate being alive in a world that is rich but in peril. `And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore?' asks Derek Walcott. `Joy.' The `mango of poetry', eaten straight from the tree, Goodison somehow finds growing in Wordsworth country and in Sligo, in Russia and Norway, in Spain and Portugal which spilled their empires into the Caribbean, in Cape Town and Far Rockaway.

Read more less

Winner of the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Ned Denny's Unearthly Toys are treacherous playthings, as rigorously structured as they are thematically unsettling, a `rhapsody of rags gathered from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled about' (as Robert Burton dubbed his Anatomy of Melancholy). The collection opens on a twilit, numinous world of exotic drugs, subterranean drums and visionary apprehension in which - to quote Twin Peaks, a recurrent leitmotif - `the woods are wondrous ... but strange'. Interspersed with original poems in a variety of complex forms is a series of illuminated and darkly erotic `remakes' of other poets' work, from the Old English classic The Wanderer to late Baudelaire via Goethe, Cavalcanti, Li Po, enigmatic troubadour lyrics, and the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen. Politics are never far away: modern man's severance from the earth, the sacred, and his own inner self has grave consequences.

Read more less

In his bold new collection, David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, casts off the worlds of myth and magical fable to focus on the fiercely personal. `Love teaches you how to mind / And how to mend’, he writes in `After a Song by Gustav Mahler’. In The Magic of What’s There Morley uses his eye for precise detail and his linguistic invention to explore childhood suffering and, in counterbalance, the joys of love, friendship and parenthood. He finds the elements of epic in the everyday, navigating the complex connections between past and present selves. His poems acknowledge our capacity for cruelty, but also for love, tenderness and mercy.

Read more less

A Full Cone is Miles Champion's second Carcanet volume. It features a substantial body of new work as well as a selection of earlier writing hitherto unavailable in the UK. 'It has often been noted that the pace at which Miles Champion's brilliantly intelligent poems unfold is rapid. Ideas and images tumble into words and the words become present as moments of conceptual or emotional consequence. But, though high velocity is in the making of the poems, there is no swift taking away. The moments aren't rescinded; the poems are not a demonstration of lyric evanescence. Champion's work, rather, is about phenomenological consequence, and consequence lingers, lasts. This is a collection of monumental significance—and the work is gorgeous.' —Lyn Hejinian

Read more less

Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. In Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark continues his investigations into the landscape and culture of the Scottish highlands and islands. His brief notations and fragments embody the precarious balance between sea and land, wilderness and civilisation, while everything is played out in a context of weather. The spaces between the poems, which both link and divide them, are shades of quiet, indications of time or distance, or graphs of the vagaries of attention. In such a climate, to farm, or walk, or write, is to persist. You come to one thing and then another.

Read more less

Moss is oceanic: his poems rise, crest, crash, and rise again like waves. His voice echoes the boom of the Old Testament, the fluty trill of Greek mythology, and the gongs of Chinese rituals as he writes about love, nature, war, oppression, and the miracle of language. He addresses the God of the Jews, of the Christians, and of the Muslims with awe and familiarity, and chants to lesser gods of his own invention. In every surprising poem, every song to life, beautiful life, Moss, by turns giddy and sorrowful, expresses a sacred sensuality and an earthy holiness. Or putting it another way: here is a mind operating in open air, unimpeded by fashion or forced thematic focus, profoundly catholic in perspective, at once accessible and erudite, inevitably compelling. All of which is to recommend Mosss ability to participate in and control thoroughly these poems while resisting the impulse to center himself in them. This differentiates his beautiful work from much contemporary breast-beating. Moss is an artist who embraces the possibilities of exultation, appreciation, reconciliation, of extreme tenderness. As such he lays down a commitment to a common, worldly morality toward which all beings gravitate.

Read more less

Joint Winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2018. In Playing the Octopus, her eighth collection of poems, Mary O'Malley's sensitivity to the spirit of Ireland's west coast is as attuned as ever. In a world both earthen and dreamlike, bodily and mythical, a trout is seen to 'swallow light through his skin', a wolf 'howls the great open vowel of his need', and in the emptiness where a tree once stood, 'a tree-shaped brightness dances'. Over the course of the collection, O'Malley twins the Irish west coast with the American east coast, Inis Mor with Coney Island, the parish with the metropolis, the pipes with the axe, each offering its own comfort and wonder. Sylvia Plath, Lois Lane and Antigone feature in an unlikely cast of heroines through which O'Malley tests the mythologies of motherhood and femininity ('no mother is ever good enough until she's dead', writes the poet, with characteristic wit). Playing the Octopus is a body of writing buoyed by the redemptive power and sustaining joy of music, and it closes with O'Malley's translations of the Irish poet Sean O Riordain and the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca.

Read more less