The poems of Keith Payne’s Savage Acres explore the pivotal role of housing and, by extension, community in our lives. Payne revisits the new urban estates of Ireland’s capital city – his own formative playing fields – and their once marginalised and neglected inhabitants who, in time, would become central to the story of the city’s imaginative resistance and cultural rebirth.
“[A]t once a salute to the life of a single housing estate, and an excavation of the individual lives it contains…”
—Mary O’Malley“Savage Acres is a terrain, a place of flow, where everyday things lead to unexpected moments of the sublime. Every page contains brilliance and life.’
—Adrian Duncan
From the Shoulder of Mutton Estate I
With a mug of Maxwell House
he sits and watches the scraw he once brought home
grow into the lawn
till the morning he doesn’t cross The Green
doesn’t pay his fare and go upstairs
to his usual seat
but removes the roofing tacks from the shed
and sails the roofing felt
over the fence.
He winds the shower flex round the apple
tree and lays the bathroom taps on the grass
as if they’d all poured green;
you see he wants to return the plasterer’s arc
spark the welder’s torch
and burn the planners’ maps
that insist on tarmacadam over all the savage acres.
Cover image: Pete Smyth
Savage Acres
April 2025
140 x 216 mm, 74 pp
