Bridge Street Books

Wicklow

Michael Longley has remarkable powers of reinvention. Certain themes remain constant - the natural world, war, violence, love, friendship, art, death - but they also keep changing because the forms and genres of his poetry never stand still. In "A Hundred Doors" a sinuous short line complements his variations on pentameter and hexameter.
And Longley's interlacing of individual lyrics, so that a diverse collection seems a single poem, intensifies in the shadow of mortality. A sequence about his grandchildren's births is counterpointed by elegies, including Longley's continuing elegy for the Great War dead. The Mayo townland, Carrigskeewaun, with its cast of leverets, otters, swans, wrens, lesser twayblade and bird's-foot trefoil, also takes on fresh guises.  The title-poem evokes the oldest Byzantine church in Greece: Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on the island of Paros. The remains of a Greek temple 'ache' beneath its floor. Wild orchids, which crop up in Greece and the Italian Garfagnana as well as Ireland, are among the collection's multiple 'doors'

Winner 2011 Costa Poetry book Award & Overall Costa Award 2011

A series of poems that explore the nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationships between people - these poems look freshly but squarely at mortality.  By turns grave and playful, arresting and witty, the poems in "Of Mutability" celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last, and in so doing restore wonder to the to the smallest of encounters.

"The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry" features the work of three Nobel laureates - W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney - as well as Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Moore, Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Eavan Boland and James Joyce. It also includes epigrams, traditional verses and Old Irish songs, with 250 new English translations by the greatest poets currently working, including Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson.
Reflecting everything from Ireland's rich history of writing about the land, to its untypical prominence of women in and writing its poetry, and the abundance of oppositions that have preoccupied its verse through the ages (from Christian and pre-Christian attitudes, to Gaels and Vikings, Nationalism and Unionism, Catholicism and Protestantism, the Irish and English languages), this is an inclusive and masterfully arranged collection of Irish verse.

WINNER 2010 Griffen Prize for Poetry

The Sun-fish reinforces convictions that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s transforming and transporting ways of seeing are like no other: there’s the “whisper of a cashmere sleeve,” the nuns’ “leathery kiss” and a lighthouse “scraping the sea with its beam.” Poems about men and the men in her family, a “woman’s story and the stories of women,” elegies, homages and her family’s history are developed through mist or the gap in a tale. Other poems tease out the tricks of light, at dawn or dusk, to open the lock of language.

"The Suntrap" in the title poem of Catherine Phil MacCarthy's long-awaited third collection is a magnifying glass through which a young girl is shown for the first time 'how to burn'. "The Lens" highlights MacCarthy's preoccupation with the act of seeing, and the tension between the quest for illumination and the act of discovery.

Caitriona O'Reilly's poetry is remarkable for its precise observation of the natural world. Her second collection, "The Sea Cabinet", broadens that clear-sighted vision in poems also haunted by history, consolidating the achievement of her prizewinning debut volume, "The Nowhere Birds." Her title-poem conjures the vanished world of the whaling industry, and serves as a starting-point for other acute meditations on natural and cultural obsolescence. Yet, the habitual concerns of the lyric self are present too, in poems which enact the dilemmas and anxieties of the individual amidst a rapidly changing environment.
 

Theo Dorgan’s Greek is a vivid, sensual, technically brilliant new collection which transports the reader through time and space, history and myth, love and death. The Greek Gods and Goddesses walk again, as real as we are, in the islands of 21st century Greece in a poetry which is singingly alive to the pleasures of being here now

WINNER 2008 Costa Poetry Award

Set in the 1950s, "The Broken Word" is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history. The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject matter - tribal violence and subsequent retribution - that seems almost Homeric, gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical drama, re-charged and re-imagined. Tom has returned to his family's farm in Kenya for the summer vacation between school and university when he is swept up by the events of the Mau Mau uprising.
Beginning with sporadic, brutal attacks by dispossessed Kikuyu on the British now occupying their land - attacks often executed with nothing more than traditional panga knives - the conflict escalates as the terrified British stop at nothing to re-impose order, eventually driving most of the Kikuyu population into the prison camps of what has become known as 'Britain's Gulag'.As Tom is propelled into violence and horror the poem mutates into a meditation on the inheritance of conflict, the destruction of innocence and the impossibility of afterwards saying what one has seen. Written with rigour, intelligence, and a fierce, unsparing clarity, this is profound, lyrical work with that rare confidence and thrilling originality that announce the arrival of a significant new voice