Book picks similar to
On Ballycastle Beach by Medbh McGuckian
poetry
favorites
inventory
ireland
Doggolescence: Poems by Kyra The Staffy
Kyra The Staffy - 2020
A collection of poems parodying the Gabbie Hanna collection 'Adultolescence', written from the perspective of Kyra - a little dog with a big heart! Youtuber, Rachel Oates, and her dog worked together to create this collection of poems and photographs which will resonate with every dog lover, but will also provide plenty of giggles for 'fans' of Gabbie's 'poetry'.
Hourglass Museum
Kelli Russell Agodon - 2010
Her uniquely true and mystical voice is like a glass of pure water: refreshing, healing, and oh, so necessary."—Nin Andrews"Her poems are an intense vision of the power of art to heal, to help us understand ourselves and our world. Agodon invokes artists as disparate as Kahlo and Cornell, Picasso and Pollock, as a way into the world she creates for us in her deft and musical poems. She brilliantly succeeds."—Wyn CooperKelli Russell Agodon is the author of two previous collections of poetry and lives in Kingston, Washington.
Music Like Dirt: A Chapbook
Frank Bidart - 2002
I wanted not a tract, but a tapestry in which making is seen in the context of the other processes—sexuality, mortality—inseparable from it.""Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country. He has given form for our age to what is most urgent and most private in the human soul: the ordeals of solitude and mortality and hunger and, recently, that action through which being speaks: the drive to make or create. Bidart’s poems sound like no one else’s; they look like no one else’s. . . . He is, in the feeling of our jury, one of the great poets of our time."—Louise Glück, jury chair, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award The Academy of American PoetsThe inaugural edition in Sarabande's Quarternote Chapbook Series which will feature a select group of poets by invitation onlyFrank Bidart's collections of poetry include Desire (1997), which received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990); The Sacrifice (1983); The Book of the Body (1977); and Golden State (1973). Among his many honors are the Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Lannan Literary Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising
Dermot McEvoy - 2014
Among the commoners in the GPO was a young staff captain of the Irish Volunteers named Michael Collins. He was joined a day later by a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, Eoin Kavanagh. Four days later they would all surrender, but they had struck the match that would burn Great Britain out of Ireland for the first time in seven hundred years.The 13th Apostle is the reimagined story of how Michael Collins, along with his young acolyte Eoin, transformed Ireland from a colony into a nation. Collins’s secret weapon was his intelligence system and his assassination squad, nicknamed “The Twelve Apostles.” On November 21, 1920, the squad—with its thirteenth member, young Eoin—assassinated the entire British Secret Service in Dublin. Twelve months and sixteen days later, Collins signed the Treaty at 10 Downing Street, which brought into being what is, today, the Republic of Ireland.An epic novel in the tradition of Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French and Leon Uris’s Trinity, The 13th Apostle is a story that will capture the imagination and hearts of freedom-loving readers everywhere.
The Left-Handed Marriage
A. O'Connor - 2014
But when they become engaged, Max’s father insists on a ‘left-handed marriage’, a custom among the German aristocracy in cases where the bride does not have the required pedigree. This means that, although Diana will be Max’s lawful wife, neither she nor their children will have any claim to Max’s eventual title or wealth. Deeply in love, Max and Diana agree to these terms and the newlyweds dazzle from Ascot to the Riviera and host lavish skiing parties at their estate in the Alps. However, as the dark clouds of war gather across Europe, Diana becomes concerned by her loving husband’s unpredictability and what she suspects are sinister secrets beneath his family’s glamorous lifestyle. When war is declared Diana finds herself caught between two sides, as her own Anglo-Irish family are fighting for the British and Max is an officer in the German army. Diana, refusing to leave her beloved husband, becomes a figure of mistrust in Germany and is portrayed as a treasonous woman in the British press. When Max is reported missing presumed dead, Diana is rejected by his family. Widowed, penniless, her reputation in tatters and her own family in Ireland destroyed by the war, Diana sets out to rebuild her life. *** A. O’Connor once more draws us irresistibly into the past and spins an extraordinary tale that holds us spellbound. Here again is that mixture of impeccable research and powerful storytelling that made The House and The Secrets of Armstrong House bestsellers
Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open: Poems
Diane Seuss - 2010
The first section of this collection pays homage to the poet's roots in a place where the world hands you nothing and promises less, so you are left to invent yourself or disappear. From there these poems both recount and embody repeated acts of defiant self-creation in the face of despair, loss, and shame, and always in the shadow of annihilation.With darkly raucous humor and wrenching pathos, Seuss burrows furiously into liminal places of no dimension—state lines, lakes' edges, the space "between the m and the e in the word amen." From what she calls "this place inbetween" come profane prayers in which "the sound of hope and the sound of suffering" are revealed to be "the same music played on the same instrument."Midway through this book, a man tells the speaker that beauty is that which has not been touched. This collection is a righteous and fierce counterargument: in the world of this imagination, beauty spills from that which has been crushed, torn, and harrowed. "We receive beauty," Seuss writes, "as a nail receives / the hammer blow." This is the poetry that comes only after the white dress has been blown open—the poetry of necessity, where a wild imagination is the only hope.
Callous
Ken Bruen - 2021
Kate Mitchell’s in the process of kicking her heroin addiction—with the help of alcohol—when a letter arrives informing her that her aunt in Ireland has passed away and bequeathed her a home near the ocean. This could be the start of a new and better life for Kate, far away from Brooklyn, where she and her surviving brothers are each struggling with their own dark pasts. But Aunt Mary didn’t die peacefully—quite the opposite. The pair of thugs responsible for her murder had plans for her house: namely, turning it into a lovely seaside meth lab. One of Mary’s killers, however, finds his focus shifting when he spots a photo of the dead woman’s American niece, who bears a striking resemblance to the late opera singer Maria Callas, the beloved object of his obsession. When Kate and her brothers arrive to claim her inheritance, they’re going to find something other than a piece of paradise . . . “Nobody writes like Ken Bruen, with his ear for lilting Irish prose and his taste for the kind of gallows humor heard only at the foot of the gallows.” —The New York Times “Bruen has a rich and mordant writing style, full of offbeat humor.” —Publishers Weekly
In a Moment
Caroline Finnerty - 2012
Their relationship is only held together by a thread. As their marriage disintegrates around them, Adam tries desperately to salvage it – while Emma does everything in her power, not only to avoid the issue, but to avoid him. But what has brought them to this point? Why is Emma traumatised by the very sight of him? And why is Adam having recurring nightmares? Jean McParland has long been living her own nightmare, battling with her son Paul whose violent outbursts have terrorised her and his younger siblings in their own home. Torn between her love for her eldest son and fears for the other children, Jean has shied away from taking decisive action . . . while their lives continued to spin out of control. Then, in just one moment, Adam, Emma and Jean’s lives became inextricably linked and were changed forever.
Made Flesh
Craig Arnold - 2008
could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." —Time Out New York"The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."—Magill Book ReviewsA girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they’ve been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world.This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and “the joy of self-forgetting,” the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other.Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old.
The Flowering Woman: Becoming and Being
Q. Gibson - 2016
Gibson. The pages explore hurt, healing, love, forgiveness, self-discovery and the journey towards becoming a woman. Written in four chapters each piece encourages healing and the journeying of self.
Nick Demske
Nick Demske - 2010
"Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room."—Joyelle McSweeneyHis name is "a transcendant uber-obsenity that can be understood universally by speakers of any language."
Accident Dancing
Keaton Henson - 2020
accompanied by evocative illustrations, it is an intimate and unapologetically personal journey through a life the way we remember them, as Keaton puts it "chaotic, fragmented and often grammatically incorrect".
The Midnight Court
Brian Merriman - 2006
This extended satiric poem assesses the growing economic, political, and familial constraints of late 18th-century Catholic Ireland under British colonial rule, while subversively playing on the tradition of the aisling (or vision) poem in which a beautiful woman represents Ireland’s threatened sovereignty.At the beginning of The Midnight Court, a dreadful female envoy from the fairies appears in a dream to the unmarried poet. She summons him before the court of Queen Aoibheall in order to answer charges of wasting his manhood while women are dying for want of love. He listens to complaints that vary from the celibacy of the clergy to marriages performed between old and young for purely economic reasons. In all their bawdy tales, the female courtiers praise fertility, as well as sexual fulfillment, and condemn the conventions of the day. At last the Queen pronounces judgment on the poet, who awakens as he is being severely chastised by all of the women of the court.While containing many insights into 18th-century social conditions, The Midnight Court is also an exuberant, even jaunty work of the comic imagination. As the translator Ciaran Carson states in his foreword: “The protagonists of the ‘Court,’ including ‘Merriman’ himself, are ghosts, summoned into being by language; they are figments of the imagination. In the ‘Court’ the language itself is continually interrogated and Merriman is the great illusionist, continually spiriting words into another dimension.”
The Daily Mirror
David Lehman - 2000
During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998. For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes. A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.
Early Works: Actos / Bernabe / Pensamiento Serpentino
Luis Valdez - 1990
EARLY WORKS: ACTOS, BERNABE AND PENSAMIENTO SERPENTINE is three books in one: 1) a collection of one act plays by Valdez and the famous farmworker theater, El Teatro Campesino, 2) one of the first fully realized, full-length plays by Valdez alone, and 3) an original narrative poem by Luis Valdez. In the first part are collected the original, improvised works of El Teatro Campesino that deal with the exploitation of Mexican farm labor in the California fields, the discrimination found by Mexicans in the schools, and Mexicans being turned into cannon fodder by the U.S. Army in Vietnam. Bernabe is a touching, Lorcaesque poetic drama about a town fool's enchantment and ultimate unity with the earth. Pensamiento serpentino is a long, philosophical poem, based on Mayan thought and cosmology, which analyzes the cultural, religious and political circumstances of Mexican Americans and prepares a metaphysical framework for their future.