These intimate, visceral and often wickedly funny poems journey through darker days of new parenthood, teasing out anxieties over violence against women and the destruction of our environment. It's Jessica Traynor's third collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Ireland's Dedalus Press. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
"Echoes and hauntings, visions and visitations, glimpses of other worlds in the margins of this ... the second collection of poems by Jessica Traynor begins with a brush with death and goes on to explore a startling variety of connections with life and the matter of living. Throughout, from the loss of loved ones to the arrival of a firstborn "no bigger / than a loaf of bread," the poems stay faithful to a busy cast of characters which includes strangers encountered on a moonlit quay, the infamous propagandist Lord Haw-Haw, and the restless spirits of recent family, national and international history"--Back cover.
Liffey Swim is the debut collection of poems from Dubliner Jessica Traynor, in which family portraits combine with myth and history to create a strikingly assured and engaging suite of poems. Delivered in a language that is at once fresh and confident, these poems have already earned the poet a number of awards and honours, and mark her out as a distinctive new talent in Irish writing. "Her finely lyrical work is informed by wide travel, a meditative intelligence and an acute sense of history, in which Dublin and its three rivers become a living metaphor for the truths and felicities of one woman's life." - Harry Clifton