Stay by Andrew Jamison
‘Clearly enraptured with language and sound . . . Jamison is an impressive new talent and Happy Hour reveals him as a multi-faceted poet with a bold and unique voice.’
— Madeleine Callaghan, Irish Literary Supplement.
Ben Wilkinson, in the TLS, praised the ‘energetic, demotic, wistful yet upbeat tones of Andrew Jamison’s entertaining, enjoyable first collection’. Kathleen McCracken, in The Yellow Nib, found in it a poetry that ‘boasts formal dexterity and an engagingly idiosyncratic way of looking at the world’. Andrew Jamison’s impressive new collection shows a deepening of style and substance. It ranges from recollections of a sojourn in Paris (‘Souvenir’), resorts in his native County Down and various sports stadia to contemplation of ‘Becoming a Box-Set Detective’. As likely to invoke R.E.M. and ‘Joy Division at the Haçienda’ as Georges Bertrand and an anonymous Irish poet, it teases ideas in lavish lyrics until ‘all I think of is coastal road, all a self is, all a county is, where they end’.
Publication date: 28 September 2017
Olympia and the Internet – Derek Mahon
Best known as a poet, Derek Mahon here gathers a further selection of recent prose pieces, autobiographical, critical and speculative, in a similar mode to his Red Sails (Gallery, 2014), notably on cinema, revision, clouds, caravans and horizons. The volume includes ‘Rubbish Theory’, reflections on refuse in contemporary culture, and ‘The Rain Bridge’, a story for children. ‘School Photo and Early Reading’ remembers his young days in North Belfast; as does ‘Olympia and the Internet’, in praise of typewriters and dis-praise of information technology.
Publication date: 28 September 2017
