Overall winner of The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition
Published November 2006. Orders placed now will be sent when the book is available.
The Irish poet Austin Clarke compared writing poetry to being loaded with chains, just like Houdini, and attempting to free oneself from them. A group of the poems in this collection deals with Houdini and his imagined alter ego de Kolta, both escapologists, and the theme of escape reverberates throughout the collection as a whole.
‘I’ve travelled all my adult life, and have been longer out of Ireland than in it, so towards the end of this book I began to play with the notion of Irishness, with a surreal sense of place. I spent many years in Asia. I wanted to solve the problem of the poet who does not have a natural constituency, rooted in the local and the national, such as Seamus Heaney began with. My aim was to draw together different strands of my experience without falling into the trap of the exotic, of merely local colour.’
Padraig Rooney was born in Ireland and educated at Maynooth and at the Sorbonne. His early stories were published in New Irish Writing, edited by David Marcus. He has published one novel Oasis (Poolbeg Press) and one collection of poems In The Bonsai Garden (Raven Arts Press) which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. He is the recipient of two Irish Arts Council bursaries. He has taught abroad for many years and currently lives in Switzerland.
Published November 2006. Orders placed now will be sent when the book is available.
The Irish poet Austin Clarke compared writing poetry to being loaded with chains, just like Houdini, and attempting to free oneself from them. A group of the poems in this collection deals with Houdini and his imagined alter ego de Kolta, both escapologists, and the theme of escape reverberates throughout the collection as a whole.
‘I’ve travelled all my adult life, and have been longer out of Ireland than in it, so towards the end of this book I began to play with the notion of Irishness, with a surreal sense of place. I spent many years in Asia. I wanted to solve the problem of the poet who does not have a natural constituency, rooted in the local and the national, such as Seamus Heaney began with. My aim was to draw together different strands of my experience without falling into the trap of the exotic, of merely local colour.’
Padraig Rooney was born in Ireland and educated at Maynooth and at the Sorbonne. His early stories were published in New Irish Writing, edited by David Marcus. He has published one novel Oasis (Poolbeg Press) and one collection of poems In The Bonsai Garden (Raven Arts Press) which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. He is the recipient of two Irish Arts Council bursaries. He has taught abroad for many years and currently lives in Switzerland.