Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, No Man’s Land is the highly assured and striking debut collection of poems by Chile-based Irish poet David Nash, an exploration and a reclamation of a place at once familiar and strange – the rural landscape of the poet’s formative years.
Returning for the first time in more than a decade, Nash re-immerses himself in a world of memory and language, folklore and custom, revealing a strikingly intimate connection with flora and fauna, land- and seascape. Yet all the while his presence feels questioned, undeserved, his calling as both participant and observer under assault from the passage of time and the overwhelming threat of the present ecological moment.
Inventive and playful, surprising and life-affirming, at its heart No Man’s Land is nevertheless a book about loss – the loss of language, knowledge, nature and wilderness that affects all of us in these challenging and troubling times.
Nash’s intimate and imaginative exploration of flora and fauna sounds the alarm for global loss of language, knowledge and wilderness while expressing the miracle of each seed and the gamble of chance.
— The Irish TimesIt’s rare for a new voice in Irish poetry to appear as fully formed as David Nash’s does… formally inventive, philosophically challenging, and tonally distinctive.— Nessa O’Mahony, Poetry Ireland ReviewAn auspicious and powerful debut – exuberant, original, comforting.
— Paula Meehan
November 2023
82 pp. 140 x 216 mm
ISBN 978-1-915629-21-0 paperback, €12.50
Cover image by Ana Galindo, by kind permission of the artist. Instagram @fibreartsatelier
