Harm’s Way

Armagh born poet Conor Carville’s debut collection of poems is an astonishingly confident and accomplished one, formally assured and always surprising and inventive. The poems move back and forth in time and across the world to listen to accounts of harm and the means through which it has been resisted or overcome. The voices of St. Patrick’s sister, of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Kandinsky, Walter Benjamin, an 18th century mariner and a wheelie-bin are just some of those that appear in poems that probe the limits of historical memory and measure the reverberations of violence both psychic and political. Memories of childhood and youth in Northern Ireland merge with reflections on the globalized present in a book that is as varied in its music and form as it is moving and incisive in its content.