We hope you will join us for a book launch at Books Upstairs at 6pm on Thursday 7 September to celebrate the publication of three new books of poems:
Another Time: Poems 1978-2023 by Gerald Dawe
Another Time: Poems 1978-2023 brings together Gerald Dawe’s new collection of poems with an extended selection from his eight previous poetry books published by The Gallery Press.
In lucid and ironic meditations on personal life, love and loss amid the disturbances of public history, Another Time shares the unmistakable lyrical grace of the poet’s earlier volumes. The art of memory and the play of the past within an unfolding and often elusive present is never far away in this ample gathering.
Gerald Dawe was born in Belfast in 1952 and lives in Dublin. He is Professor of English and Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin.
Woman of Winter by Vona Groarke with illustrations by Isabel Nolan
Woman of Winter is a version of ‘Lament of the Hag of Beare’ from 9th century Irish. Vona Groarke draws on contemporary experience of the ageing female body, its desires and accommodations; its occlusions and slightings. By turns wishful, rueful, resigned and furious, it rummages in the ageing process to pull from its various settlements a piercing and resonant voice. In her re-framing of a poem already twelve centuries old, she makes a poem for the ages, rhyming richly with our times.
In a collaboration between two of Ireland’s preeminent artists, Isabel Nolan’s exquisite illustrations evoke the speaker of the poem in vital youth and vivid old age.
Poet, critic, editor and essayist, Vona Groarke is current Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. This is her fourteenth book.
Isabel Nolan is one of Ireland’s leading mid-career contemporary artists. Working in a wide array of media she is represented by Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.
The Swerve by Peter Sirr
The Swerve is Peter Sirr’s eleventh collection. His most recent, The Gravity Wave (2019), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and winner of the Farmgate National Poetry Award. A book as ample as it is confident in its risk taking, its mixed tones range from the bold assertions of ‘A Valediction’ and the positive note of this poem’s ending to the delicacy of ‘Threshold’. The remembered and the imagined are bound in a poem like ‘Ages’ while a ‘new’ vocabulary is incorporated in ‘Arrivals’ where ‘the language teeters, the fun begins’.
This book confirms that Peter Sirr is one of our truest, bravest and most adventurous poets.
Peter Sirr lives in Dublin and works as a freelance writer, teacher and translator.
