Go Giants - Softcover

Laird, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571327508 ISBN 13: 9780571327508

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2015

Synopsis

To a Fault, Nick Laird's debut collection, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; On Purpose , his follow up, won a Somerset Maugham award for travel writing and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. In Go Giants , his third and most ambitious volume, Nick Laird's poetry travels yet further afield, connecting the shores of his native Northern Ireland with those of the American east coast where he spends increasing time. The result is an almost trans-Atlantic fusion, an inventive melding of Ulster lyricism with proto-Beat rhythms and phrase. The author's gaze appears longer and more penetrative than before, casting back across the ocean to find a fresh perspective on older questions while vividly capturing the vibrancy of the new. Nick Laird writes with wit and candour, with polemic and persuasion, with no subject seemingly too large or too small: weapons of mass destruction, sectarian violence, religious faith, Jonah and the Whale, marriage, fatherhood, a daughter. A profoundly versatile collection, equally capable of public crescendo and a more personal hum, Go Giants is a daring and a thrilling endeavour by a writer described by Colm Toibin as 'an assured and brilliant voice in Irish poetry'.

About this title

About the Author:

Nick Laird was born in 1975 in Co. Tyrone, and studied English at the University of Cambridge, where he won the Quiller-Couch Award for creative writing. His debut collection, To a Fault (2005), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize; his second, On Purpose (2007), the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He is the author of two novels and lives in London.

From Publishers Weekly:

Though Laird (On Purpose) now lives in New York, his third poetry collection looks back insistently to his youth in Northern Ireland, and to the modes and the literature of Ireland and the U.K. Laird's background can get him compared to Paul Muldoon, but a closer analogue is Glyn Maxwell, whose almost populist ease, and occasional swerves into mystery, Laird shares: his casual fluency, its sense of conversation among the ancient past, English books, Irish towns, and contemporary urbanity may charm or baffle Americans. The two-part collection begins with a miscellany—a delightful light poem of marital love (Talking in Kitchens), and another on pregnancy (Laird is married to the novelist Zadie Smith), a whimsical list of clichés (the title poem), a crushing and memorable anecdote about a girl bullied at school. Of The Future, Laird writes, I can tell you that the organizing principle is grief. You will lack weather. Laird ends with a more diffuse series in unrhymed tercets, its segments named for bits of Pilgrim's Progress, touching on his own time in New York and Rome; he decides that the history of history is ridiculous,/ that these specifics were sufficient, then oscillates between minutiae from travel, recollections of a childhood during the Troubles (The monotony of always being on a side!), and metaphysical quotables: We do as we are told./ The stars are hard and deaf and cold. (Sept.)

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0571327508
• ISBN 13: 9780571327508
• Binding: Paperback