Three new collections coming in May 2025:
In States, his fourth collection, Ciaran Berry offers poems that are attentive to the cinema of the moment and the film that becomes the life. They meditate on everything from the blockbuster to the B-movie, and there’s the footage from the author’s own life, offering an encounter with the increasingly dis-United States, where he has now lived for more than a quarter of a century, and with an Ireland he recognizes more and more only through memory. Often we find him in transit, looking down on clouds during a transatlantic flight or driving his newborn son home through the snows of Connecticut. What does it mean to be an alien of any kind?, he asks.
High-stepping between giddiness and gravity, in long lines that work to bridge the gap between now and then, and here and there, these poems also consider what it means to live on this fraught planet as it spins anti-clockwise at roughly a thousand miles per hour, and where it seems, now more than ever, as if the funfair has ended and the disaster movie has just begun.
Cover image: ‘Reflection’ by Catherine Barron
Just as an infinity pool gives the illusion of one invisible edge, the dividing line between poems and the world they process can be magically tricky to discern. Infinity Pool, Vona Groarke’s ninth poetry collection and fifteenth book, tests the limits of spaces poems make for themselves. In language precise, luminous and spry, these poems write into the point where anything might slip into something else — the Atlantic become an actor; a luggage carousel be a reckoning; a poem nudge itself gently over its own fourth wall. From the author of work previously described as ‘exquisite, pitch-perfect’ (PN Review) and ‘for the ages’ (Dublin Review of Books), this is an ingenious, exhilarating collection from one of our foremost poets.
Cover image: ‘That Kind of Day’ (2023) by Eve O’Callaghan
‘My father’s father took his chance/on the first flight over Lisfannon.’ So begins a poem in Frank McGuinness’s eighth collection, The River Crana, a book equally at home in Donegal as Japan and ancient Illyria. His poems have been praised by Seán Hewitt in The Irish Times for their ‘dark contours and gothic atmosphere, their sensory detail and sly humour’ — traits clear in this new book in which ‘Buncrana, Christmas Eve’ is vividly evocative of the author’s home town in his childhood. From poems of empathy with the death of Sylvia Plath and the lost children of Pompeii, anything is possible: ‘I might yet learn,’ he writes, ‘to drive a lorry.’
Cover image: ‘Path by a Large Tree’ by Mary Swanzy
