Description
A world of machines, machine management and communication is at the heart of Cork-born poet Billy Ramsell’s second collection of poems. From credit card point-of-sale devices to personal music players, from mobile phones to cardiac supports, the world is seen as enabled, criss-crossed and perhaps even bound by digital signals that between them comprise a new life force on the planet, and one we have scarcely begun to comprehend.
“Billy Ramsell is one of the younger poets who has most fruitfully brought into Ireland the best influences of a British generation including Don Paterson, Michael Donaghy and Ian Duhig – formal sophistication allied to natural spoken idiom, an appetite for the minutiae of contemporary life as eclectic as Paul Muldoon, and an unforced, often witty merging of the public with the intimate. In coming years, he should have much to give to an Irish tradition he has already helped to expand.”
— Harry Clifton
“Billy Ramsell is a poet who finds beauty even in the midst of one of the ironic winters a human heart has known. Why? Because he knows how to sing. This book is an inventive, piercing work.”
— Ilya Kaminsky