October titles due out on 15th October are three new poetry collections by Alvy Carragher, John FitzGerald and Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh [bilingual].
The Only Fear I’ve Ever Had Is Standing Still – Alvy Carragher
In Alvy Carragher’s fourth collection, The Only Fear I’ve Ever Had Is Standing Still, a questioning voice moves between continents and through the fractured landscapes of memory. Poems ask how we continue after a difficult childhood, and how a life might be understood when the past resists any single, coherent narrative. In work that wonders why ‘some days get printed / on the heart’ the poet touches on survival and departure and on how we might go on.
Family is both refuge and source of harm, and father figures cast long shadows over these pages. Generations carry the effects of silence, mental illness and inheri-ted violence, yet the poems remain open to the wider world and to the possibility of kindness. In lines where ‘love [is] like a teaspoon scooping the sun / from a soft-boiled egg’ moments of tenderness become a way of enduring.
Energetic, expansive, and empathetic, this courageous book is as disquieting as it is consoling.
Mud Angels – John FitzGerald
Without offering solutions or resolution the poems in Mud Angels grapple in their original ways with themes of love, displacement and injustice. Often they pitch art for art’s sake against the hard realities of political and social discrimination and the growing alienation felt by a humanity struggling to save its planet. The sometimes intensely private tone is matched by a deep compassion for others and a skilful appreciation of the beauty of the natural world.
Together and individually these poems help us to appreciate better the vulnerability of the individual in the face of political inequality and social trauma; the transitory nature of cultural and artistic expression; how love can persevere despite everything; how memory is often all that matters, and is sometimes all that’s left.
This Deep – Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh
In his response to The Coast Road, her previous bilingual collection, in Poetry Ireland Review, Proinsias Ó Drisceoil concluded: ‘This book places Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh at the core of contemporary poetry in Ireland.’ This Deep builds on that collection’s accomplishment. The translators include two saoithe of Aosdána, Paul Muldoon and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, three other poets published by The Gallery Press, Alvy Carragher, Alan Gillis and Michelle O’Sullivan, and Billy Ramsell.
In her observations on Tonn Teaspaigh, the source of the original poems in This Deep, Daniela Theinová wrote the ‘close association between the private and the public realm does not only follow from the poems’ thematic span, but reflects the book’s primary theme and concern, which is love. Regardless of whether this love manifests itself as a reassuring warmth or oppressive heat, joyous wonder or insistent worry, it always cuts right into life’s real core.’
