Matthew Geden’s second collection of poems explores questions of belonging, travel and displacement – and the challenges of staying connected in an ever-changing world. Many of the poems echo a sense of being ‘on the edge, halfway out / the door’. The poems often zoom out to a cool objective view, while others chart intimate relationships and their potential to change everything: ‘the mountains blush / under the glint / in your eye’.
“A quiet contemplative poet alive to the hours and the seasons. A true voice.”
Derek Mahon
I can’t go back, return to the house
where I was born, the spinney
in which I lived. I would see
myself in the hallway, outside
the living-room door, listening for news
of the adult world, my childhood in limbo.
(from ‘Limbo’)
Born in the English Midlands, Matthew Geden moved to Kinsale, Co. Cork in 1990 and runs a bookstore in the town. He co-founded the SoundEye International Poetry Festival in Cork, and his poems have appeared in magazines like Shearsman, Poetry Salzburg and Agenda, as well as anthologies like Something Beginning with P: New Poems from Irish Poets (2008) and Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dedalus, 2010). His first full-length collection, Swimming to Albania, was published in 2009.