The Gallery Press hopes you will join us to celebrate the publication of Of Shards and Tatters (Eamon Grennan), Devotion (Mícheál McCann) and American Anthem (Kelly Michels) at a book launch at Hodges Figgis, Dawson Street, Dublin on Friday 17 May at 6.00pm. Mícheál McCann and Kelly Michels will read at the event. Join us to welcome these new voices.
Of Shards and Tatters – Eamon Grennan
For more than forty years Eamon Grennan’s poems have been applauded for the carefulness with which they pay attention. In recent years a new generation of writers and readers has embraced his luminous art which is clearly seen in Of Shards and Tatters.
As memorable as it is moving, Of Shards and Tatters is a book of assent and persistence by an enduring spirit, intent on and glorying in ‘simple survival’.
Devotion – Mícheál McCann
At the heart of Mícheál McCann’s eagerly awaited first collection is ‘Keen for A— ’, a re-imagining of Eileen O’Connell’s heartrending Lament for Art O’Leary. In Devotion the poet transports the original tragedy in time and place. Echoing the 18th-century Irish, it lives now in contemporary Belfast where a young man’s male lover is murdered.
For all the solemnity of its subject matter love poems leaven its atmosphere as Mícheál McCann’s debut glows with the sense of someone who knows he has ‘discovered the name of his destination’.
American Anthem – Kelly Michels
‘After spending a week sleeping on the floor / of a crack house she comes home dragging / a heap of bones.’ So begins Kelly Michels’ sometimes shocking debut as the author remembers observing her mother. Blending lyric and narrative modes the dominant strands of American Anthem focus on the tragedies, both personal and national, of the opioid epidemic and its devastating effects of addiction and of gun violence in America where the author grew up.
This is an urgent, necessary book, a severe indictment of the mammoth pharmaceutical companies and of the merchants and proponents of arms.
American Anthem proclaims a new voice in Irish poetry. It is an outstanding, bold and brave first collection.
