Description
Pádraig J. Daly’s latest collection of poems is set in a challenging place, “our unGodded world”, as one poem calls it, “our infected kingdom”, another. It is a place of darkness and heaviness of the soul, where things are left unfinished or in ruins and the sun goes down “protesting”.
But it is also a place that is somehow redeemed, a place made, if only momentarily, radiant by the perception of a greater design, by the vision of “a yellow ecstasy of leaves” in the street, and, most of all, by the guileless love and affection of the young whose laughter “lights / Every cobwebbed corner / Of our hearts”.
As in his previous books, God in Winter includes a number of Daly’s versions of early Irish poems, remarkable for their simplicity and lightness of touch. At a time when what might be called ‘poetry of faith’ goes against the prevailing fashion, Daly makes a distinctive ‘good news’ out of accumulated small perceptions that between them offer solace and seek to counterbalance the troubles of the human heart.
“In a limpid, luminous style couched in simple, accessible language and presenting as little more than fragments, Daly’s poems penetrate to the core of reality…” – Brendan Hoban, ACP.
ISBN 978 1 910251 06 5 Paperback
216 x 140 mm, 86 pp
2015