Conor Carville’s first collection of poems moves back and forth in time, and across the world, to listen to accounts of harm and the means by which it has been resisted or overcome. The poems probe how violence and abuse reverberate through history and memory, politics and psychology, be it through the voices of St Patrick’s sister Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Kandinsky, Walter Benjamin, an 18th-century mariner or a modern-day wheelie-bin.
Moving and incisive, the poems also combine memories of childhood and youth in Northern Ireland with reflections on the globalised present.
Conor Carville was born in Armagh City. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University, he is currently a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Reading. His critical work on cultural theory and Irish writing, The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History, Subjectivity, was published by Manchester University Press in 2012. In 1997 he won the Friends Provident Irish National Poetry Prize, and in 2007 the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. He lives in London.