It's 1970s Ireland: Jack O'Connell saves the life of an American sailor, Troy, who repays him by unwittingly stealing the love of his life, Kate O'Rourke. Jack fights to win Kate back, but his perfect life falls apart when she dies. In the fall out, he loses custody of their son, Cathal, to his embittered sister-in-law, but many questions remain ......
Grammar of Passage details a German family's quiet lives as they are pulled into the gathering maelstrom of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Monika Cassel's attention to detail in this debut, tempered with a deep empathy brings individual moments to vivid life, deftly demonstrates how poetry can excavate and reinvigorate history.
For more than a decade, the Barbican Young Poets programme has served as a base for experimentation, creative development and an ever-extending community of poetic practice. From the Ground to the Birdsong collects and celebrates work produced by poets of the 2024 cohort.
After over a decade working as a musician under the name Kae Sun, Kwaku Darko-Mensah Jnr. makes a full-blooded return to poetry. His debut Flood Season explores diasporic belonging, the tensions between who we are and the cliches that surround our nation states, and hybridity.
Written originally in Me'phaa, First Rain is a selection of poems that emerged from the poet responding to the death of his grandmother who declared to him in 2005: I will die in the days when the first rains come. The work mourns both the loss of a grandmother, and the fading away (like her sight in later life) of a culture and language that hold ......
Feeling a way through the electric, breathless experiences of young adulthood, 'Every Single One' is the debut pamphlet from Nina Bahadur. From New Year's Eve to the stretches of summer, dealing with prickly relationships and an exhaustive search for identity, these poems are an honest and unabashed exploration of youth, intimacy, and growth.
Don't Speak Easy is Tom Jameson's debut pamphlet. Its scope ranges from a childhood spent in the immediate wake of the Second World War to a projected future where death provides the opportunity to spin back to the very beginning of life at breakneck speed. Jameson's skill as a poet and storyteller never loses sight of the fine grain of human ......
'Deluge', as with Charlotte Ansell's previous books - 'you were for the poem' and 'After Rain' - displays an unerring emotional honesty. Confronting therapy, family, as well as social shifts like gentrification, Charlotte draws perspective from the community she lives in and distils it into the poems that make up this stunning collection.
In 'Catching the Cascade', his long awaited debut collection, Paul Lyalls presents verse that documents his long career as a performing poet, exploring the motifs of childhood, love, consumerism, second hand cars and his native North. His punchy, breathlessly entertaining poetry stems not just from a razor sharp wit but from his genuine love of ......
