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  After Party - A Telegraph and...

  Dean Browne

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  A Poetry Book Society RecommendationA Sunday Times, Telegraph and Irish Times Book of the YearDean Browne arrives at the After Party with the maturity and style of an altogether more seasoned poet. In a debut collection of standout and stand-alone poems, each tests the boundaries of its unique universe. Browne is a mesmeric teller of strange tales, imaginings that can seem origamically contained within the compressed dimensions of a poem. A leg sets off on a long train journey; a Parisian alley cat is launched into space; earthbound lovers attempt to connect while their inner lives prove unbridgeable.Losses are mourned: two poets elegized here – Charles Simic and the late Donegal poet Matthew Sweeney – might offer a fingerpost of sensibilities, though Browne’s significant talent is distinctly his own. After Party introduces a beguiling, resonant new voice, a raised eyebrow and fidelity to the image – sometimes carried along the tightrope much further than seems possible. In poems that are both death-haunted and youthful, and thrumming with a delicious dark humour, Dean Browne brings a much-needed injection of the surreal – or the surreal-ish as he might prefer to say – to Ireland’s rising generation.'Wildly expressive and exuberant, throwing out phrases and ideas almost recklessly. . . After Party is surely the start of an exceptional poetic career' – Graeme Richardson, Sunday Times Books of the Year‘Poems that sneak in the side-door then exit through the ceiling’ – Caroline Bird'The success of this Cork-based 31-year-old is by no means a surprise . . . But it’s still refreshing to encounter such a distilled, haunting voice' – Telegraph, Books of the Year‘Dean Browne is a terrific poet: his language is agile and fresh, his ideas surprising, and the reader feels invigorated, renewed – and lucky to have met such poems’ – Nick Laird

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  The Naming of Names

  Shash Trevett

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  Shortlisted for the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize
  Over 100,000 Tamil civilians were killed during the Sri Lankan civil war, their deaths often dismissed as collateral damage. What happens to names once the person who wore them dies? When there is no one left alive who remembers the laughter they once carried. In the ordinary course of a life every syllable of a name would be fully used up: a full life led. The violence of war doesn't merely decimate the physical body: it shocks into silence names, lineages and history. This book is a tender exhumation of the lyricism of Tamil names: of flowers, the moon and stars; of beauty, music and grace.
  Expanding upon the work in her powerful and moving 2021 pamphlet From a Borrowed Land, Shash Trevett's The Naming of Names bears witness to the Tamil experience during the Sri Lankan civil war through poetry that spans a broad range of responses to this violent and tragic history.

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  The Irish Detective

  Thomas Kennedy

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  You are in the capital city of Ireland. Like any city there are problems. Your job is to find Irish solutions to Irish problems.Your team includes your beautiful Russian assistant Alice and the dangerous ex-army ranger, called the PMC, who has a slightly scrambled brain. Your customers include gangsters, police, business men, politicians and tailors each with a unique problem.Each chapter is a short story but characters remain and develop as the book progresses.

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  The Ballad Of The White Horse -...

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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  "The Last Great Epic Poem in the English Language"- Dale Ahlquist"The ending is absurd. The brilliant smash and glitter of the words and phrases (when they come off, and are not mere loud colours) cannot disguise the fact that G. K. C. knew nothing whatever about the 'North', heathen or Christian."- JRR TolkienThe tale of King Alfred, the Christian king who in 878AD battled a Viking invasion that had conquered the rest of England and burnt some cakes. He then became the last holdout of resistance against the invaders and forced the conversion of the Danish king Guthrum to Christianity after the battle of Ethandun. Chesterton says "This ballad needs no historical notes, for the simple reason that it does not profess to be historical. All of it that is not frankly fictitious, as in any prose romance about the past, is meant to emphasize tradition rather than history. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history."Named after the chalk horses carved into English hills (and partly set at Uffington), it begins with an exhortation to true Christianity in the face of despair and defeat, and ends with a prediction of more barbarian invasions. It focuses on the nature of faith in times of despair, and on the true strength of local kings in the face of empires."... you and all the kind of ChristAre ignorant and brave,And you have wars you hardly winAnd souls you hardly save...."In some far century, sad and slow,I have a vision, and I knowThe heathen shall return...."They shall come mild as monkish clerks,With many a scroll and pen;And backward shall ye turn and gaze,Desiring one of Alfred's days,When pagans still were men."

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  The Rupture Tense - Poems

  Jenny Xie

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  Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory  
  transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged. 
   
  The Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end  
  of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.

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  Grains of Galaxies - A...

  Kristi Brooks

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  This collection of short stories and poems ranges from mysterious fires that spring up from the earth to ghostly spirits roaming in a long-forgotten home to true love that is found and lost way too soon. 
  There are tales of gods who have gone mad and those who have forgotten what it feels like to create and love with empathy. There are encounters that seem like normal everyday situations, but they are anything but normal. Dispersed throughout are poems that tie together the ideas of worlds within worlds and galaxies within a grain of sand.

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