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Selected Poems
Shortlisted for the Poetry Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers’ Week Through four highly acclaimed collections, Colette Bryce has steadily consolidated her position as one of the most important of the younger generation of Irish poets. Possessed of a preternaturally acute ear and eye, Bryce is the recorder and observer of tense times: perhaps no contemporary poet has better mapped the fault-lines of nation and family, of love and tribal loyalty, of landscape and border. In all this, Bryce again and again declares the primacy of song as a redemptive practice, and a glorious end in itself: no voice is more accurately pitched or effortlessly musical. Selected Poems draws together the best of her poetry from The Heel of Bernadette to The Whole & Rain-domed Universe, winner of the Ewart-Biggs Award, and is a marvellous introduction to the range and sweep of Bryce’s work.
The M Pages
A brilliant, moving book . . . Reminiscent of one of this century’s great elegies, Denise Riley’s A Part Song, The M Pages is similarly probing, hurt, skeptical and smarting . . . in a book packed with good poems.' Irish Times The reader might be justified in thinking that the ‘M’ in the title of Colette Bryce’s new collection could stand for ‘mortality’, ‘mourning’, or the spontaneous and cathartic practice of the writer’s ‘morning pages’ – until they reach the book’s arresting central sequence. Addressed to a named ‘M’ who has suddenly died, this fourteen-part poem depicts the experience of unexpected bereavement, and the altering effect such events have on ...
Self-Portrait in the Dark
The dark attunes our eyes to detail the light can sometimes conceal; similarly, Colette Bryce’s new poems are ‘slant tellings’ that reveal strange and true reflections. Using a wide range of imaginative strategies, Bryce examines the ways in which time is held, space enclosed – and a life framed and given meaning: a face in a broken mirror, a spider trapped under a glass, or a stolen kiss in a car-wash. Bryce’s two previous prize-winning collections were widely admired for their marvellously seductive music and their speed of thought; Self-Portrait in the Dark widens and deepens the poet’s scope, and is her most emotionally compelling collection to date. Praise for The Full Indian Rope Trick ‘[Bryce’s] poems, sensitive as the needle that registers some distant earth tremor, are delicately poised . . . Bryce’s vision is questing, disquieting, dark . . . as she seeks out the truths of life and love that transform the human heart. This is a confident, complex, subversive collection that shows us the magic by which one becomes a mature poet’ The Times
The Full Indian Rope Trick
Colette Bryce's The Heel of Bernadette was one of the most highly praised new collections of recent years, winning both the Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection, and the Strong Award for best new Irish poet. Her second, The Full Indian Rope Trick – the title poem already the winner of the 2003 National Poetry Competition – sees a leap forward in confidence and range, with Bryce's dark lyric and darker wit finding many different voices. Whatever subject the poet takes – an Ulster childhood and the child's growing awareness of her divided community, the surreal life of the natural world, or the more disturbing shadows thrown by our love and desire – it is always addressed with both a compelling emotional candour and an astonishingly musical intelligence. Pillar Talk That magician/who stationed himself on a pillar/over Manhattan/for thirty-five hours/knows nothing whatever/of loneliness/or how it is/for people like us/who have no soft acre/of cardboard boxes/not even the eggshell/flashbulbs of the press/or the well-meant antics/of neighbours with a mattress/to temper the thought/of the hard, hard earth,/to break the fall./Nothing at all.
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe
The Whole & Rain-domed Universe is Colette Bryce's much-anticipated follow-up to Self-Portrait in the Dark. The book presents the reader with an extraordinarily clear-eyed, vivid and sometimes disturbing account of growing up in Derry during the Troubles, with many ghosts both raised and laid to rest. The Whole & Rain-domed Universe is a riveting poetic document of the time; Bryce turns her clear, singing line to darker ends than she has before, describing not just the warmth and eccentricity of family and the claustrophobia of home-life, but also the atmosphere of suspicion, and the real and present threat of terrible violence. Bryce is one of the most widely acclaimed poets of the post-Heaney generation, and this is her most directly personal and compelling work to date.
The Heel of Bernadette
This is the first collection from a young poet from Northern Ireland. There is a woman who feels sick as she prepares a turkey for Christmas dinner; the boys who sit on a wall ouside the Bolger trial; and lovers' telephone calls.
The Whole & Rain-domed Universe
The Whole & Rain-domed Universe is Colette Bryce's much-anticipated follow-up to Self-Portrait in the Dark. The book presents the reader with an extraordinarily clear-eyed, vivid and sometimes disturbing account of growing up in Derry during the Troubles, with many ghosts both raised and laid to rest. The Whole & Rain-domed Universe is a riveting poetic document of the time; Bryce turns her clear, singing line to darker ends than she has before, describing not just the warmth and eccentricity of family and the claustrophobia of home-life, but also the atmosphere of suspicion, and the real and present threat of terrible violence. Bryce is one of the most widely acclaimed poets of the post-Heaney generation, and this is her most directly personal and compelling work to date.
In the Chair
All of the poets interviewed in this collection are from Northern Ireland, all were born after 1920, and each has published at least one volume of poetry. Arranged chronologically by each poet's date of birth, this collection deals with an impressive body of work. The poets include Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, John Montague, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, as well as less-known voices, including Gerald Dawe, Roy McFadden, and Conor O'Callaghan. The interviews explore the poet's work and development, the social/historical context, and the impact of assimilated influences. If they explore a poetry often rooted in "the North," they also suggest the individuality and diversity of this poetry, of work whose imaginative range is not circumscribed by either literal borders or critically convenient categories. The other poets included are: James Simmons, Tom Paulin, Frank Orsmby, Medbh McGuckian, Robert Greacen, Cathal P Searcaigh, Colette Bryce, Moyra Donaldson, Jean Bleakney, Martin Mooney, Padraic Fiacc, and Cherry Smyth.
