Winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2006
Enda Coyle-Greene's Snow Negatives is an exciting debut from a poet whose work is already well known from literary magazines and journals.
In poems that are at once formally alert and alive to the possibilities of new departure, Coyle-Greene records outward journeys and experiences, but always measured against a time when "the slow ash of innocence clung / to the cigarettes we smoked / behind the bicycle sheds" ('Witches'), and, increasingly, the awareness of mortality and the "eerily familiar" recognitions occasioned by merely going home.
"This is a remarkable collection, assured, measured and adult—poems of loss and consideration, poems that look on the world with a cool, clear eye. The world we say we live in is put under pressure here in poems that manage to be both icily detached and achingly human… This is poetry that is strong, sure, and totally trustworthy… This is poetry of earned authority."
—from the Judges' Citation, Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2006
Enda Coyle-Greene was born in Dublin in 1954. She lives in Skerries, Co. Dublin with her husband and daughter. She has published widely and is a frequent contributor on RTÉ Radio.
Enda Coyle-Greene's Snow Negatives is an exciting debut from a poet whose work is already well known from literary magazines and journals.
In poems that are at once formally alert and alive to the possibilities of new departure, Coyle-Greene records outward journeys and experiences, but always measured against a time when "the slow ash of innocence clung / to the cigarettes we smoked / behind the bicycle sheds" ('Witches'), and, increasingly, the awareness of mortality and the "eerily familiar" recognitions occasioned by merely going home.
"This is a remarkable collection, assured, measured and adult—poems of loss and consideration, poems that look on the world with a cool, clear eye. The world we say we live in is put under pressure here in poems that manage to be both icily detached and achingly human… This is poetry that is strong, sure, and totally trustworthy… This is poetry of earned authority."
—from the Judges' Citation, Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2006
Enda Coyle-Greene was born in Dublin in 1954. She lives in Skerries, Co. Dublin with her husband and daughter. She has published widely and is a frequent contributor on RTÉ Radio.