Irish poet Enda Coyle-Greene’s second collection of poems begins with a question about what, apart from laughing, we should be doing ‘on this exquisite earth’, and ends with the supposition that it is sometimes more than enough to be ‘back in your life, life going on.’ In between are all the journeys - real and imagined - at least attempted on a daily basis. A sense of a world in motion pervades the poems whose protagonists are rarely still. Wanderers, drifters, nightwalkers and aimless drivers resign themselves to regret, remorse or simple misunderstandings. The past to which many of them are drawn remains a place where ‘everything’s done differently.’ The collection’s central sequence, ‘Salvage’ explore the aftermath of a notorious maritime disaster off north Dublin, the poet drawing on newspaper archives and a variety of poetic forms in order to recreate the range and scale of the human tragedy.
Enda Coyle-Greene was born in Dublin in 1954 and lives in Skerries, Co. Dublin. She has published widely and is a frequent contributor to programmes on RTE Radio. The manuscript of her debut collection Snow Negatives won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2006 and was published by Dedalus the following year. She holds an MA (Dist.) in English, Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast.