Poetry - Reading it, Writing it, Publishing it
Compiled and edited by JESSIE LENDENNIE

Poetry – Reading it, Writing it, Publishing it offers frank and carefully considered information for poets, and others who are interested in knowing more about how the poetry world works. As well as exploring basic tenets for aspiring writers, the book contains personal essays by poets and publishers from Ireland, Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and Zimbabwe: Primrose Dzenga, Rita Ann Higgins, J.P. Dancing Bear, Celia de Fréine, Michael Heffernan, Kevin Higgins, Seamus Cashman, Nessa O’Mahony, Maurice Harmon, Joan McBreen, Lex Runciman, Joseph Woods, Eamonn Wall, Susan Millar DuMars, Emily Wall, John Hildebidle, Caroline Lynch, Jean O’Brien, Chris Mansell, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, John FitzGerald, Noel King, Philip Fried, Todd Swift, Simmons B. Buntin, Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons, David Gardiner, Anne Fitzgerald and Stephanie McKenzie.

more info>>

Trucker's Moll
Poems by ROSEMARY CANAVAN

Canavan’s lyric voice is strong and sure, almost lilting, certainly musical, and provides a metrical spine that can hold up any subject. 
Patricia Monaghan, Booklist

Rosemary Canavan was born in Scotland, and brought up in County Antrim. Her first collection The Island was published by Story Line Press, and was shortlisted for the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize at the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 2001 she was Writer-in-Residence for Co. Kerry, and from 2006-7 she was Poetry Editor for Southword. She has worked as a graphic designer, and a teacher in varied locations including Belfast, and Spike Island and Cork Prisons. At present she teaches Creative Writing in County Cork.

more info>>

Falling Body
Poems by DAVID CAVANAGH

The poems in Falling Body, David Cavanagh’s second collection, cover ground with quirkiness, precision, and grace. They move the way a life moves – in and out of personal and public territory, past and present perspectives, inner and outer worlds. They chart inevitable falls and celebrate, sometimes with wry humour, sometimes with muted joy, getting up again. The poems touch down lightly on large topics and move on, nervous of becoming trapped in easy certainties. They love the complexities while yearning for simplicity.

more info>>

Long Division
Poems by ANDREA COHEN

Lyric compression and a wonderful command of the plain style make Andrea Cohen one of a handful of poets who can make her voice the conscious echo of her mind. And it's a mind well furnished with whimsy, heartbreak, and moral questioning, a mind brilliantly attuned to the tragicomic, Kafkaesque nature of the day to day

more info>>

Cohort
Poems by PHILIP FRIED

Cohort, with its three-poem introduction and book-length sonnet sequence, draws inspiration from the sonnet’s origins to update it for the Digital Age. Linked from its earliest days with legal proceedings and a modern psychology of conflicted love, the sonnet held together what wanted to fly apart. Petrarch miniaturized the standoff of forces in the oxymorons he used to characterize his divided emotions—sick health and freezing fire. Acknowledging this tradition of warring but tightly bound forces, Fried re-conceives the contemporary sonnet as an arena where fragments of self and samples of lingo play off against one another. And colouring these contests is a love intrigue that implicates the reader.

more info>>

Downstate
Poems by DAVID GARDINER

The poems in Downstate recount journeys from David Gardiner’s native Chicago & Polish neighborhoods of his childhood, to the Southern territories of his distant American past, to the contemporary Ireland where he has lived over the past twenty years. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “The truth is, that, every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes.” Gardiner’s work does not forget his ancestors, who extend back proudly through past the Civil War in America on one side, and to twentieth-century Poland on the other. These poems explore a rich subterranean heritage uniting the cities and landscapes in which he has lived and worked stretching from Dublin to Chicago to New York uniting pasts & presents as families break and build again. 

more info>>

The Full Shilling
A Memoir by JAMES LIDDY

James Liddy’s memoir The Full Shilling follows The Doctor’s House (Salmon, 2004), but takes a different perspective, exploring the world of Liddy’s parents and their friends in mid-twentieth century Ireland. He presents an extensive gallery of portraits of those he knew in Ireland and the U.S. including his peers at U.C.D. Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, Francis Stuart, Thomas MacGreevey, Michael Hartnett, Noel Browne appear on these pages together with many senior American writers and literary figures.  The memoir, unusually (in keeping with Liddy’s eccentric style), includes short stories set in the years of his growing up in Ireland. The effect is personal, exhilarating and definitely more than nostalgic.

more info>>

Heather Island
Poems by JOAN McBREEN

In this, her fourth collection, Joan McBreen interrogates loss and completes a journey of renewal. A quiet strength sustains the consistently elegiac mood of Heather Island. This poet of autumn and diminishing light revisits the shapes and colours of Tully lake and mountain in Connemara, the ‘browning bracken’ and ‘the late blackberries’. But McBreen also travels far beyond the comfort of the familiar, to South America, to Borges and Neruda, to the mysteries of passing time and death. There is a serenity and sense of liberation in her poems of acceptance, of ‘souls set free/wheeling in the wind/unhurried/in a vast sky/beyond sound’. Geraldine Mitchell

more info>>

Lovely Legs
Poems by JEAN O'BRIEN

A lively and very readable collection; O’Brien has returned to many of her earlier themes, including dislocation – as she seeks to capture the precise moment of an event, its fulcrum.

There are poems of heart and hearth and human relationships, familial, sexual and historical: a father neglecting to teach his young daughter to swim, the trapped girls of The Chinese Chest and poems of nature; often as closely concerned with the nature of man as the countryside they describe.

Many of these poems, though serious in intent, are dealt with in a lighthearted and often witty manner, exploring a fascination with the ways of the world and its moral contradictions.

more info>>