We’re delighted to announce four new titles from The Gallery Press which will be published this month.
New titles from The Gallery Press include two new poetry collections: one a debut collection from Molly Twomey, Raised Among Vultures; the other from established poet, Seán Lysaght, New Leaf; Derek Mahon’s collected translations, The Adaptations (1975-2020) and a long suppressed Brian Friel play, The Mundy Scheme.
Raised Among Vultures – Molly Twomey
Look, if we are going to do this,
know that I was raised among vultures.
— ‘Don’t pick me tulips’
Such bold injunctions announce a formidable new talent. In Molly Twomey’s spectacular, and frequently disturbing, debut seemingly nonchalant expressions of hard experience (‘Over coffee I tell you I slept with some guy’) meld with vivid imaginings. Excited hearts are ‘bumper cars’, a Coke is ‘a huge cup of starless sky’ and a radish is ‘a red grenade’. In this world of Tumblr, online group therapy, NA and Touch ID, Molly Twomey’s unflinching art chronicles a history of eating disorders and inner conflicts. These are frontline reports from the outposts of youth, ‘nights / spent drunk with boys we could barely remember, / would never forget.’ But Raised Among Vultures, while venturing that ‘It’s impossible to live without breaking someone’, is also a book about longing and lessons — ‘It took so long to learn that I won’t die / if I sleep in.’ In her first collection Molly Twomey breathes new life into Irish poetry.
Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, County Waterford, and graduated in 2019 with an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork where she now works as a Library Assistant. She has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The Irish Times, Mslexia and The Stinging Fly. She has been chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series and was recently awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary.
New Leaf – Seán Lysaght
Seán Lysaght was born in 1957, grew up in Limerick and now lives in Westport. He taught for many years at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. His prose publications include Robert Lloyd Praeger: The Life of a Naturalist, Eagle Country and Wild Nephin. The Gallery Press publishes Venetian Epigrams, translations from Goethe (2008), and six collections of poems.Selected Poems appeared in 2010. He received the 2007 O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry.
The Adaptations (1975-2020) – Derek Mahon
Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941. He received numerous awards including the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize and the David Cohen Prize for a ‘Lifetime’s Achievement’. The Gallery Press also publishesTheatre (2013), New Selected Poems (2016), Against the Clock(2018) which received the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, Washing Up (2020), Autumn Skies (Writers on poems by Derek Mahon) and The Poems (1961-2020), both 2021. The Prose will be published in 2023. Derek Mahon died at home in Kinsale, County Cork, in October 2020.
The Mundy Scheme – Brian Friel