Dedalus Press

Brink opens with its title-poem and it stays on the brink of various worlds and conditions throughout. Most crucial is the brink between life and death, each of which is seen from the perspective of the other as in the great five-part sequence ‘Republic’, showing how death is interwoven into life. But, precarious as the brink is, the unyieldingly sympathetic foundation of these poems in the reality of family and immediate perception is wholly redemptive. Ferriter’s is a world aware of Rilke’s beauty and terror; Art, particularly music, offers consolation for the fragility and terror of the world in Bosnia or Afghanistan or Civil War Kerry. There are great, redemptive elegies for Shane McGowan, Sinead O’Connor and Seamus Begley.

Storm Damage weaves personal, historical and mythological threads to create a book that recognises and celebrates the power of words, not least in times of personal and collective challenge. Whether charting the events of her own family life or responding to records in Dublin’s North Inner City Folklore Collection, the poems and songs contained here have the shadow, and occasionally the light, of history cast over them. For a book in which the word ‘home’ makes frequent appearances, Cullen’s world is never closed but always open to the outsider, the less fortunate and the downtrodden. Health concerns give Storm Damage an added resonance, but Cullen’s power is as a singer of hurts – and of salves – beyond the merely personal, and in this energetic and engaged new work, she takes to her role with a persuasive and light-footed passion.

Much of Sudden Light, Irish poet Enda Wyley’s 6th collection of poems, takes place in the centre of her native Dublin where the poet lives. Views and glimpses of the immediate city, both as foreground and background, as well as interactions with its inhabitants, comprise the daily exchange of life and create the sense of a present moment balanced on the city’s various layers of personal and shared history. Many of the poems respond to a wide range of paintings, from Janet Mullarney to Luca Signorelli, and photography is also an inspiration as if memory were a kind of picture-taking or -making – the job of the passing poet to observe, to record, and to move on.

Jaki McCarrick''s debut poetry collection opens with the title poem which recasts the crazed king of Irish legend as a modern-day female struggling to cope with the distractions and pressures of our age.London-born, and raised there and in Co. Louth, again and again McCarrick is drawn to the exploration of difference, of otherness, her keen eye seeing never just place alone, but glimpses of the longer narratives of connection and belonging.Throughout, the various roles of daughter, writer, friend, lover and neighbour are interrogated, with more than once a voice delivering a surprising new perspective on what we thought we knew or take for granted.