From treasures in museums to paintings in galleries and churches, from first impressions of the unfamiliar to fresh takes on the well-known and -loved, the triggers behind the poems in Pat Boran’s seventh collection, Then Again, in the main depart from the poet’s trademark starting point of autobiography.
Instead in Then Again his focus is very much outwards, with the poems comprising a mini Odyssey that takes in parts of Ireland, Paris, Sicily, Cyprus and elsewhere, finding along the way the echoes of earlier discoveries and deeper concerns.
The book’s title acknowledges both the unexpected returns and the subsequent re-evaluations that memory occasions as it makes new connections between present and past, between our personal journeys and our shared fate.
These are splendid poems, comprehensive and wide-ranging in their subjects and themes, profound in their feeling, making for one of the finest collections to appear in recent times. — RTÉ Culture
The poems here can be complex, storied, revealing themselves slowly and gracefully. Boran has the knack of making them seem simple (deceptively) but drawing out powerfully the purpose and point … Boran knows the fragility of being human and alive, the tragedy and the absurdity, but his perspective is optimistic, life-affirming. — The High Window (UK)
A writer of great tenderness and lyricism …”– Agenda (UK)
Local and international, personal and scientific, full of wisdom and wry humour …”– Irish Literary Supplement (USA)
Boran’s warmth of vision finds positives, even where others have not. In the remarkable prose poem “Compost”, a regeneration following bereavement comes with a realisation that life and death, like the “I” and the “we” elsewhere, are always interwoven:
“The death and the remaking of the world […] The dark ferment and fermentation. The break-up, the breaking down, the shifting round of what this life starts out with and never ceases to renew or reinvent. The seed, the pith, the spore […] the slow-emerging tendrils of new growth, tenuous and strange, up through the rich, thick canvas that is compost for the first time then, and then again, then little by little, day by day by day.”
– Brendan Lowe, Dublin Review of Books
Read an extended review of Then Again by Patrick Lodge in The High Window
Stillness
Like two startled meerkats
sensing a predator’s approach –
the return of the king
from some battle, the arrival
of his wayward, ‘inquisitive’ son –
hoping not to be chosen
these two female servants
take a deep breath
then stand so utterly still
that not only the moment
but the greater part of recorded history
passes them by,
all the ugly intentions of the world
muttering to themselves as they vanish
back into the night.
(Female Figurines, circa 1200 BC. Leventis Municipal Museum
of Nicosia, Cyprus)
ISBN 9781910251430 PB
ISBN 978910251447 HB
140 x 216 mm / 5.5” x 8.5”
90 pp approx
20 March 2019
