Many of the poems in Time's Guest, Kevin Graham’s second collection, find themselves outdoors — in woods, along the coast, down alleyways — by turns praising the natural world and mourning its evidential ruin. Time is the throughline and its paradox is uncompromising — ‘we shake the hand / of time and face an unbreakable fact’ (‘Walking Home Drunk from The 1975’).
Elsewhere, music and art inform jubilant lyrics that meditate on luminaries from J M Synge, Jack B Yeats and J M W Turner to The Frames, The War on Drugs and My Bloody Valentine. The central sequence ‘The Company of Trees’ plays with the language of ecology and literary history while ‘Easter 2024’ riffs on W B Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ for the modern era. Rooted in the everyday and the otherworldly — both formal and free — these are poems that yearn for company and to be read and re-read.
Kevin Graham's first collection, The Lookout Post, won the 2024 Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award.
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“[Kevin Graham] is one to watch. He may be a new arrival on the scene, but he’s definitely going places. And so, as you said, when The Lookout Post, his first collection, came out in 2023, it garnered a good deal of critical praise and attention, and it’s not hard to see why in this collection either. You know, he’s a skilled, graceful writer. His poems, I think, manage to be elegantly crafted but without seeming in any way contrived or overly workshopped, which is sometimes a risk. They really do brim with emotion, to the extent that every other poem he writes sounds like a love poem, even if his subject happens to be nature or music or art or whatever else it may be.
— Ciarán O’Rourke, Books for Breakfast
Book Information
Publication date: 4 September 2025
Details: 88pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 894 9
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 895 6
Cover: ‘Variation, No.2′ (2023) by James O’Connor, acrylic on wood. Courtesy of the artist and the Taylor Galleries.
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