By Paul Perry

Gunpowder Valentine: New and Selected Poems

Gunpowder Valentine: New and Selected Poems from much-admired Dublin-born poet and teacher, introduced by Siobhán Campbell

Description

Gunpowder Valentine is the much anticipated New and Selected Poems from one of Ireland’s most distinctive and singular poetic voices, a poet whose work is at once precise and open-ended, true to the world of experience and, simultaneously, engaged with the mysteries of existence.

In the words of Dermot Bolger, “His is an imagination without borders, a probing and unsettling intelligence lightly worn.” Gunpower Valentine presents the best of his three collections to date as well as a substantial selection of new poems which explore, among others things, the fertile ground of myth and show once again Perry’s narrative dreaming in full flight.

“Perry forces us to think about our place in the world, to take a stance, to engage with the poem which will not provide closure but an opening, a chink through which to observe the lived life. In this sense he is a moralist, but in the subtlest form, demanding that we join in his powerful statement of what poetry can do and why this art is essential.”
— Siobhán Campbell from the Introduction

ISBN 978 1 906614 94 2 Paperback
216 x 140 mm, 250 pp
June 2014

Additional information

Weight .35 kg
Dimensions 216 × 140 mm

Product Detail

  • ISBN : 9781906614942

About The Author

Author

Paul Perry was born in Dublin in 1972. He has won the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award and The Listowel Prize for Poetry and has been a James Michener Fellow of Creative Writing at The University of Miami, and a Cambor Fellow of Poetry at The University of Houston. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, TLS, Granta and The Best American Poetry 2000. He has been a Writer in Residence for Co. Longford, the University of Ulster, and Rathlin Island. His first book The Drowning of the Saints was published in 2003 to critical acclaim. This was followed in 2006 by The Orchid Keeper and in 2009 by The Last Falcon and Small Ordinance. His translations include 108 Moons; The Selected Poems of Jurga Ivanauskaite. He has taught creative writing at Kingston University, London, and University College Dublin and was curator of the largest and longest running international poetry festival in Ireland, dlr Poety Now. Together with writer Karen Gillece he is the author (under the penname Karen Perry) of two popular and much-praised thrillers. REVIEW EXCERPT “His is an imagination without borders, a probing and unsettling intelligence lightly worn.” — Dermot Bolger