We are proud to announce three new titles from new and established authors due for publication on 24 June 2021.
Two of these titles are from emerging poets, Audrey Molloy and John FitzGerald, whilst the third is a collection of Dublin essays by established writer Peter Sirr.
The Important Things – Audrey Molloy
Audrey Molloy’s remarkable and distinctive first collection, The Important Things is an unusual display of different forms. The book resounds with echoes of other writers but is the work of a true original. From ‘What We Learned at Loreto’ to ‘Lockdown Boogie’ it explores the surreal, the dreamt and the down-to-earth everyday in images laced with humour, science and sex. It chronicles the end of a marriage and the discovery of new love and renewed passion. ‘Know you tried’ concludes the book’s opening section. Its second part comprises a sequence of poems that mourn her mother, savour memories and rue missed opportunities. The Important Things is a woman’s tale reported in feisty, sensual and beautiful poetry. Audrey Molloy has received the Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry and the An Post Irish Book Award for Irish Poem of the Year.
The Time Being – John FitzGerald
Clarity in vision, thought and language, distinguishes The Time Being, John FitzGerald‘s first collection. With poems that explore place and memory, family, relationships and the natural world, John FitzGerald establishes a potent empathy with his reader through a watchful, precise poetry. Some poems enact themselves through their linguistic physicality and rootedness in place. Others search deeper for what it means to be alive and alert in the world today. Moments from America, Iceland and China are set among experiences of the land and countryside around the poet’s home in rural Ireland. All are revelations of one sort or another, their controlled energy producing a drama that is at once private and universal. Delighting in setting, language and form, The Time Being marks the arrival of a distinctive presence in Irish poetry.
Intimate City – Peter Sirr
Intimate City, Peter Sirr’s rich and rewarding essays reflect a long-standing attachment to and obsession with the Dublins of the past and present: the contemporary city but also the ancient walled city or the city mapped in 1756 by a French Huguenot or the one enumerated in 1803. Present and past, personal and public, memory and invention intersect in a book enlivened by the sense of the city as a layered place where people have lived and died for more than a thousand years. The essays in Intimate City wander through the physical space of the author’s inner city neighbourhood and the speculations of developers, but also the ‘mind city’ of writers, poets, artists and ghosts. Often at stake too is the contested city of competing narratives and visions where battles are fought over what and who is celebrated or commemorated. Tracing old routes, tracking new ones, adventuring in streets, houses and rooms, these essays collectively amount to ‘a chain of linked desires’: to walk the city, ‘ to drink in details . . . listening for the steps of those who’ve been here before . . . to greet time, stop it on the pavement before it scurries off’.
All of these titles are available to pre-order.
