Some upcoming book launches - Salmon Press

3 from Salmon Press to be launched on |Tuesday 8th November 6.30pm in Books Upstairs.

Fish On A Bicycle - New and Selected Poems by Jean O'Brien

This New & Selected is a revisiting of Jean O'Brien's four collections starting with The Shadow Keeper in 1997 and moving up to the present day. Her new poems mark a maturing of her work dealing with ill health, parenthood, nature and everything in between. As with her previous collections her work is honest and direct and calls for a similar response from the reader. As ever she broaches hard subjects without fear or compromise and faces her own mortality. These poems are dealt with in a light-hearted way that belies their seriousness, they are lively and always readable.

The Art of Dying by Adam Wyeth
From mountain pass to storm-tossed seashore, from Barcelona to the Drakensberg, these new poems by Adam Wyeth feature journeys both witty and surreal.  There is much that is busy transforming here, from kitchen to ice-rink; rock to hatching egg.  In the richly imagined Talking Tree Alphabet, a birch tree becomes Marilyn Monroe holding down her skirt, while the blackthorn is a ‘ravaged whore’. At the heart of the collection, the still point around which the energies flow, is a boy’s relationship with his father, the absurd indignity of death, and the ceaseless unfolding of the generations: ‘An ancient vellum/ where the next life is written’. Language, the raw material of the poet who shapes and makes sense of the world, is celebrated without forgetting the humble source of it all, Yeats’s foul rag and bone shop, or ‘thorns/that draw blood and score the heart completely’ (from ‘Gorse’). Dancing on the edge of civilization, preferring the energizing potential of dream and myth, Wyeth’s is a refreshing new voice on the Irish poetry scene.  Katie Donovan

Slow Clocks of Decay by Patrick Chapman
Slow Clocks of Decay is Patrick Chapman’s seventh poetry collection, his most mature and expansive to date. Exploring universal themes through the lens of his remarkable imagination – the loss of friends to suicide; the insidious nature of depression; the inevitability of ageing; and the destructive effect of religion – Slow Clocks of Decay culminates in a bravura sequence that conjures the poet’s own final journey as a fantasia of Hitchcockian intrigue set in a Paris of the mind.