Synopsis
"I have always admired people with ideas and flair and imagination. Eithne Hand has it all. This first book of her poetry is a fresh new voice and for me paints so many wonderful pictures."
-Kathleen Watkins
"Fox Trousers sparkles with an inimitable mix of wit and wisdom. Eithne Hand’s poems of close observation surprise and delight, moving from playfulness to tenderness and from the mundane to the mysterious in the space of a breath. In the music of her lines, as in our lives, joy and grief live side by side."
-Jane Clarke
"Eithne Hand is wary of the ‘love of mirrored self’. Instead her poems look outward, generously and wittily to the loving father of a focus-puller, to a man clutching his double bass and other men clutching their penises, to a pencil’s humility, Saint-Saens’ insides, a ‘magnificent’ woman scrubbing by hand, to what an atlas, a coastal rock, or a lemon waiting to be squeezed might like us to know; a mare with her foal reminds us of loss, a playground swing of acceptance and a dog teaches us joy. Which, more than anything, is what this collection is – a joy."
-Gerard Stembridge
Table of Contents
Summer Yearn 11
Attention 12
Hard Chaw 13
Arm’s Length 14
Surprising Material 15
Border Bus 1979 16
The Focus Puller’s Father 17
At Sadler’s Wells Stage Door, London 18
Vaudeville Talent Night 19
Organ Symphony 20
Built-in Adolescence 21
Desire 22
A Broad Vocabulary 23
Feeder 24
Storm Petrel 25
Come Back Peter, Come Back Paul 26
Nature Table 27
Atlas 28
The Sound That Photographs Make 30
An Sruth Geal / The Bright Stream 31
lost alphabet of gym 32
Brownies 1969 33
Look Back 34
My Contagious Sister 35
Face Value 36
Swinging 60s 37
Clearing the Lane 38
Grief #1073 39
Served 40
Burnaby Park 7.55am 41
Timing 42
Light Your Own Fire 43
The End Of St.Barbara 44
On Kilburn High Road 45
Little Skellig and the Icebergs 46
Jet Dracula 47
Settled 48
To Make a Mark Not Permanent 49
Driving Lessons 50
Grief #8 Endanger 51
Oh Danny Boy 52
Air Brakes 53
May Delaney 54
Playground 55
Missing Words 56
Underfoot, Your Bed of Peel 58
Unshackled 59
A Collie Called Beamish 60
Joy comes to me as a Flying Trapeze 61
About the Author 63
About the Author
Eithne Hand grew up in Greystones, Co.Wicklow and is a writer and producer. 'Fox Trousers' is her first poetry collection. She has been published in THE SHOp, Southword, Crannog, The Irish Times, The Moth and Poetry Ireland Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award, was highly commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue Prize in 2016 and shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize 2018 and 2020. She has written and directed three radio plays broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and her documentary, Voicejazz, won a Prix Italia for Best Work on Music. She was Head of RTÉ Radio 1 from 2003-2006 and now works independently with RTE Lyric FM on their weekly poetry feature, Poetryfile. She worked with Gay Byrne for the final four years of his Sunday Jazz programme. As a theatre producer, she tours the one man shows The Man In The Woman’s Shoes and I Hear You and Rejoice, both written and performed by Mikel Murfi. From 2014 to 2017 Eithne was the curator of the First Thought strand of the Galway International Arts Festival. She spends her time between Greystones and Ballinafad, Co. Sligo.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
