The Gallery Press hopes you will join us to celebrate the publication of What Remains the Same (Alvy Carragher), Cargo (Polina Cosgrave) and Long Distance (John FitzGerald) at a book launch at Books Upstairs, Dublin on Thursday 18 April at 6.30pm.
What Remains the Same by Alvy Carragher
In Alvy Carragher’s compelling new collection, What Remains the Same, journeys are strivings to escape. Rooms hold ‘the shadow / of an old home, another country’ while, in the book’s title poem, a young woman ‘must swallow pain, remain silent. / This is the shape of her life.’ History hounds the writer’s heels and ancient hurts return as she searches for a voice and for forgiveness. These poems contain a gamut of emotions — from the kindness of a stranger on an aeroplane to ‘Aftermath’ in which a character ‘wanted to hurt him’. In work that tells ‘the whole house deaf / to what it was that went on / in the rooms of its daughters’ What Remains the Same is a distressing book. But through the illumination of dark passages in her own and in our country’s woes Alvy Carragher, in poems touched by something like love, presents a tale of survival and a guiding light.
Cargo by Polina Cosgrave
In the novel art of Cargo, Polina Cosgrave’s second collection poems address her young daughter, weigh the world ahead of her and posit a better future.
Evocations of the author’s native Russia and a country ‘where no one can sleep at night’ pave the way for the chilling documentary detail of the title poem and the desperation it fends off. But this wide- ranging book also embraces the erotic (‘the mere touch of you / is a lit match’) and the ecstatic (‘just put your palm / between them / and you’ll know’) as they meet the tenderness of poems such as ‘What Makes You Special’.
With social consciousness, wit, elegance and a cavalier abandon, Cargo confirms the presence of a daring, vital new voice in Irish poetry.
Long Distance by John FitzGerald
It is no surprise that Long Distance, by the author of the widely praised The Time Being (2021), reveals the deepening impression of a poet who is both chronicler of all that fades and passes and observer of ‘our giant reapers’ that harvest wind for ‘our new elixir’.
In forms that range from sequences of sonnets to haiku he acknowledges and brings to life vividly worlds familiar and strange — what he calls ‘the remote and the ordinary’ — as he hovers somewhere between them. A schoolboy absorbs the effects of Seán Ó Riada’s cortège. There’s a translation of an early photograph and the ‘surround sound’ of a corncrake while settings reach from his home place in West Cork to Queensland, Australia, and a mountain in China’s Hunan province.
‘I have work to do / to keep it all as it is,’ he writes in resonant and remarkable poems cognizant that ‘a long note / from an angel’s throat once sung / can never be silenced’.
