An extended meditation on loss, displacement, disillusion, grief and love, so close in theme and style that the book can almost be read as a single poem.
In the devastating title poem, we are told that ‘someone blew up the house/where I grew up’, and from then onwards Wall takes us on an emotional and intellectual journey through times and spaces which are both personal and political, private and public.
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ISBN
978-1-910669-87-7
Pub Date
Friday, September 01, 2017
Cover Image
Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890) The Yellow House (The Street) Arles, September 1888 oil on canvas, 72 cm x 91.5 cm Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
An extended meditation on loss, displacement, disillusion, grief and love, so close in theme and style that the book can almost be read as a single poem.
In the devastating title poem, we are told that ‘someone blew up the house/where I grew up’, and from then onwards Wall takes us on an emotional and intellectual journey through times and spaces which are both personal and political, private and public.
Affectionate and playful love poems, elegies, satires on church and state, meditations on the meaning of place, on idealism and ideology, on personal and public loss come together to paint a portrait of a restless mind in search of a fixed point from which to understand the absurdity of life.
WILLIAM WALL is the author four collections of poetry, four novels and two volumes of short fiction. His work has won many prizes including The Drue Heinz Prize, The Doolin Prize for Poetry, The Virginia Faulkner Award, The Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Sean O’Faolain Prize and many more. He has been short- or longlisted for, among many others, The Man Booker Prize, The National Book Awards, the Raymond Carver Prize and The Manchester Fiction Prize. Writing of his previous Salmon Poetry collection Ghost Estate, Philip Coleman said: ‘ Wall engages not just with current Irish economic and political crises but Ghost Estate is also a book that explores the larger, darker contexts of our contemporary historical climate.’ Wall’s work has been translated into many languages and he translates from Italian. He is a fellow of the Liguria Centre for the Arts & Humanities. He was commissioned by Cork City Council to collaborate with artist Harry Moore to produce the Shadowlands exhibition and book.
