To Star the Dark Brendan Kennelly

To Star the Dark Brendan KennellyDo our passions control us or us them? These poems find themselves asking such questions in hospitals, in cellars, in Parisian parks and American laundromats, inside our screens and beyond them. Poems of blood and birdsong, of rain and desire, of aftermath and ambivalence, each spoken by a voice, which like the starlings sings, at once, both past and present. Looking into the dark sky of history, Doireann N Ghrofa calls up an illuminating fire, a

but the realism of the humour gives a reassuring earthiness

Peter Blackman

I was eight

this foxy elusiveness may be his defining feature

renowned for his innovation and originality

But at the core of this collection is a vivid series of attempts to strip away the exhausted mythologies of the writer's own country and the increasingly-packaged places he visits

fragments of memoir

The author developed a children’s theatre group in the camp

performativity

Alison Brackenbury on Tim Liardet

and the continent of Australia

A collection framed within a conceit of journeys