Museum Crows
Poems by RON HOUCHIN

Ron Houchin taught in the public school system of the Appalachian region of southernmost Ohio for thirty years. Raised on the remote banks of the Ohio River in Huntington, West Virginia, he has travelled throughout Europe, Canada, and the U.S. His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The Southwest Review, Appalachian Heritage, The New Orleans Review, and over two hundred other venues. He has been awarded an Ohio Arts Council Grant for teachers of the arts, a tutorial fellowship to teach in a Dublin, Ireland, writing workshop, a poetry prize from Indiana University, as well as a book of the year award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association. His poems have been featured on Verse Daily. This is his third collection from Salmon Poetry.

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Human Costume
Poems by A.E. STRINGER

The poems in Human Costume explore the multiple figures we become. If spirit inhabits form, then our human selves wear flesh and feeling like costumes that both veil and reveal what animates us. “Is this a laugh on real / life or a mask we cannot take off, put down?” the speaker asks in “Low Opera,” considering life’s imitation of art. At the heart of the book lies the calendar’s juxtaposition of All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, which celebrates the soul’s extremes. From the unearthly delights of being alive in the cosmos, through the sufferings of armed conflict and the further trial-and-error of work and love, to the artful (and artfully misrepresentative) forms our human desires take, this book takes a wide angle on the great pageant.

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The Follower's Tale
Poems by STEPHEN ROGER POWERS

Like nothing else in Tennessee or anywhere else, Stephen Roger Powers’ The Follower’s Tale explores the lovestorms, hardships and delights long yarned and yodeled in country songs, but this whirlwind of a collection at once ironizes, subverts and deepens the miseries and joys of yearning without ever taking its eyes off the miraculous Dolly Parton. As the narrator observes, fantasizes and even channels the Pigeon Forge nightingale, he discovers that her down-to-earth royal kitsch provides the key to life’s most elusive mysteries. By the time Powers has worked his magic, even the slovenly wilderness will want to wig up and warble a chorus of “Jolene.”
R. T. Smith

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Are you ready?
Poems by JOHN CORLESS

“The Ireland of 2009 has almost as many ‘serious’ poets as it does blocks of unsold apartments. What I love about John Corless’s poetry is that instead of pretending to sit po-faced on the summit of Mount Parnassus, it goes absolutely in the opposite direction. Like Swift, Paul Durcan and Rita Ann Higgins before him, Corless takes the low road and shines the telltale torchlight of his killer wit into all the most embarrassing areas of contemporary Irish life. No-one is safe. If the truly serious are those who see the world for the joke it is, John Corless is one of the most serious poets we have. He is also a great performer of his own poems, one of the brightest rising stars of the live poetry scene. If you get the chance to go and see him read, do. Desperate Housewives will be repeated. John Corless may not.” Kevin Higgins

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Saint Michael In Peril of The Sea
Poems by JANICE FITZPATRICK SIMMONS

In this, her fifth collection, Janice Fitzpatrick Simmons continues to record the journey of a rich and passionate life. Moving on from the earlier poems of migration and love and loss she now concerns herself with survival, rebirth, the tentative rediscovery of love in all its doubts and certainties. Rich in its evocation of different land- and sea-scapes, this poetry of pilgrimage and of physicality celebrates the Atlantic coasts of Donegal, the estuaries of the South East, the slow canals of the midlands, the agelessness of tradition in Brittany. Fitzpatrick Simmons achieves a rare blend of American desire to achieve form with the more Irish expression of the liberating potential of imagination and music. A collection to savour – often.

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Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt
Poems by BEN HOWARD

Ichigo ichie (“one time, one meeting”), a motto associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, enjoins the host and guests in the tea hut to treat each encounter as unprecedented and unrepeatable. Infused with that conviction, the poems of Ben Howard’s sixth collection bring an exact and ceremonial attention to the things of this world. Whether the object of attention be a red-twig dogwood, Dublin in July, or the “lucid silence” envisioned by Thomas Merton, these poems speak in a language of open awareness and a voice of uncommon grace.

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a compact of words
Poems by rob mclennan

a compact of words, Canadian poet rob mclennan’s fifteenth trade title, comes out of a series of reflections on domestic matters – a break-up, his daughter – influenced by the ghazal as brought into Canadian literature through the American ex-pat John Thompson in the 1970s. Through disparate leaps, the lines write as much between them as the words themselves, writing out a clear and present labyrinthine voice that goes beyond even what the words themselves convey. Where not a word is wasted.

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Grace Must Wander
by STEPHANIE McKENZIE

In Stephanie McKenzie’s second collection, grace wanders through snowdrifts and late nights and finds its way to Northern Ireland, Newfoundland and the United States. In these poems, grace feels a particular affinity with Van Gogh, with Sylvia Plath, with women who can no longer speak for themselves. We learn that grace must wander even with the lonely sight of crows.

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What Vanishes
Poems by JOHN MENAGHAN

What Vanishes contains four sections: poems of place and displacement set in such far-flung locales as Budapest, Berkeley, Vancouver, Point Pleasant, and the skies above Australia along with Dublin, Ballybunion, Dingle, and Drumcliffe; poems of love and loss, engagement, alienation, and endurance; poems focused on music and musicians, from blues to bluegrass to punk to jazz; and “found” poems from sources as varied as Diane Arbus, Teilhard de Chardin, job postings, a calendar, a bus shelter, and a fortune cookie. Through this startling variety of poems in a range of forms from blank verse to free verse to “shaped” poetry runs a steady concern with what it’s like to find and lose, to be lost and found, in a world in which our fate is, as Yeats has it, not only to be “in love” but always to love what vanishes.

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Along The Liffey: Poems and Short Stories
by SHEILA O'HAGAN

Sheila O’Hagan began writing in 1984 while studying at Birkbeck College, London University. In 1988 she won the Goldsmith Award for Poetry, and in 1990 returned to her native Dublin. In 1991 she won the Patrick Kavanagh Award and in 1992 the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Award for New Irish Poet of the year. She has twice been awarded First Prize for Poetry at Listowel Writers’ Week. She was the winner of the Strokestown International Prize for a single poem in 2000. Her short stories and poems have appeared in, among others, The Adirondack Review, Atlanta Review, The Sunday Tribune, Syracuse Review & Working Papers in Irish Studies.

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The Essential Guide to Flight
Poems by CELESTE AUGE

A strong first collection from a poet whose clear eye and cool voice combine in poems of clarity, intelligence and occasional startling beauty. Mary O’Malley

The poems in The Essential Guide to Flight take multiple points of view: they journey through life, through relationships, across borders and oceans, through emotional landscapes; giving glimpses of our hidden lives, the invisible desires and trials that make up a life. They delve into the experience of the immigrant and the cultural outsider. From the opening poem The Borrower, to Fireproof, the poem that closes the collection, these poems examine the myths we invent, myths we have to live up to, and the way we mythologize people, places, and our past.

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Standing in the Pizzicato Rain
Poems by GEORGINA EDDISON

A slim volume from the winner of the 2008 Listowel Writer's Week Poetry Competition

These poems like the pizzicato rain of their title are refreshing, musical and slightly strange. Georgina Eddison is joyfully serious about her themes: family, childhood, work, history, are captured in wonderfully warm, deft, light-filled poems. Her parents’ hilariously sparring marriage, her Aunt May dancing naked in her room at fifty in an English suburb, Mrs Sonnix on her way to the pawnshop – the people never stay still. But this poet is more than a lucky onlooker, and from children in their bedrooms like mermaids ‘singing, singing’, to Anna Freud, to imagined fish in a surreal ocean, she has an unshakeable grasp of her poetic art which reinvents them all in language and imagery that are deceptively simple, bright and strong. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

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At Grattan Road
Poems by GERARD HANBERRY

In this, his third collection, Gerard Hanberry goes for rawness and honesty, exploring a deeper well of feeling – while there is humour and celebration he does not shirk the darker shades of regret, fear, anger and loss. While some pieces are pithy and compact, others capture a moment in life with the arc of a short story. Thoughtful, yet sometimes playful, in the best of these poems the personal and political are fellow travellers, while the everyday and the fantastic are inseparable heartbeats. As a teacher by profession, he knows how to close one eye then the other, the role of perception – juxtaposition of contrary positions, the creative tension between knowing yet still asking those same awkward questions. 
Pete Mullineaux

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In Sight of Home
A Verse Novel by Nessa O'Mahony

“Nessa O'Mahony’s writing is subtle and precise and this fine book crackles with truthfulness. But even more importantly, this is a work of great beauty, a story of how past and present flow into one another all the time. It’s a moving, powerful and richly pleasurable read, audaciously imagined and achieved.”
Joseph O’Connor

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Starting from Anywhere
Poems by LEX RUNCIMAN

Starting from Anywhere is based upon the generous belief that poetry can begin with anything: a painting, a line from another poem, or even how perfectly ordinary things can “balk account.” The urgency underlying these quiet poems reveals how the eye and imagination can, must, or perhaps simply will, remake the world.

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The Watchful Heart - A New Generation of Irish Poets - Poems and Essays
Edited and presented by JOAN McBREEN

The Watchful Heart – A New Generation of Irish Poets – Poems and Essays is an anthology of the work of twenty-four Irish poets born in the last fifty years. It contains biographical and bibliographical details of each contributor, together with photographs. All poets included have published at least two collections of poetry. Poetry in Irish with translations is also included. None of the poetry in this anthology has previously been published in collection form and most of the essays are published here for the first time. McBreen’s anthology The White Page/ An Bhileog Bhán: Twentieth-Century Irish Women Poets (Salmon Poetry, 1999) is now in its third reprint.

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