The
title poem of Conor Carville?s second collection takes off from a London church
and its congregation, but pushes on out into planetary, even cosmic dimensions.
In another poem, the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett appears in the TV room
of a London mental hospital, to tell the strange story of a mass on Clapham
Common in 1984, when the London-Irish assembled to celebrate his beatification.
These poems, and many others here, reassert the capacity of song to grasp the
shape of a life, a community, or a world, in the shadow of its vast disorder.
Sometimes lyric, sometimes violent, this is a book that teems with the
martyrdoms, both everyday and epic, that punctuate our lives.
Conor
Carville is a poet and critic from Armagh, N. Ireland. His first collection, Harm?s
Way, was published by Dedalus Press. He lives in South London with his wife
and daughter.
Praise
for Harm?s Way
? a first
book of inspiring range and confidence, traversing cultural history and global
modernity to find figures for harm and love, and shaping them in a language of
weird substance and full song. Prac Crit.
Harm?s Way ranges over an imaginative territory
that is as dark, funny and disturbing as Matthew Sweeney?s, the art by which it
does so ? apparent in the lexical opulence and acoustic accuracy at work
throughout. Poetry Ireland Review