Nick Laird

So open it anywhere, then anywhere, then anywhere again. We're sure it won't be long before you find a poem that brings you smack into the newness and strangeness of the living present, just as it did us' (from the Introduction)In The Zoo of the New, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. Above all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a powerful timelessness: words with the thrilling capacity to make the time and place in which they were written, however distant and however foreign they may be, feel utterly here and now in the 21st Century.This book is the condensed result of that search. It stretches as far back as Sappho and as far forward as the recent award-winning work of Denise Riley, taking in poets as varied as Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks along the way. Here, the mournful rubs shoulders with the celebratory; the skulduggerous and the foolish with the highfalutin; and tales of love, loss and war with a menagerie of animals and objects, from bee boxes to rubber boots, a suit of armour and a microscope.Teeming with old favourites and surprising discoveries, this lovingly selected compendium is sure to win lifelong readers.

Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. At the books heart lies the title sequence, a profound meditation on a fathers dying, the reverberations of which echo throughout in poems that interrogate inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retrieved.Laird is a poet capable of heading off in any and every direction, where layers of association transport us from a clifftop in County Cork to the library steps in New Yorks Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelos Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a Kilburn garden. There is conflation and conflagration, rage and fire, neither of which are seen as necessarily destructive. But there is great tenderness, too, a fondness for what grows between the cracks, especially those glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, before the knowledge or accumulation of loss, where everything is still at stake and infinite, the darkness under the cattle grid.

To a Fault, Nick Lairds 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. In Go Giants, his third and most ambitious volume, Nick Lairds 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 authors gaze is 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 writeswith 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.

Celebrated for his novels and screenplays, Nick Laird has been an assured and brilliant voice (Colm Toibin) in contemporary poetry ever since his impressive debut, To a Fault, in 2005. This is his strongest collection to date, in which we sense the deep American influence from living in New York meeting his familial shores of Northern Ireland: the acoustically generous, longer lines of the new worlds Ginsberg or Whitman, and the lyricism of his forebears Heaney, MacNeice and Yeats. These are smart, energetic, worldly poems of political edge and family tenderness.

Alison Donnelly ha sufrido por amor. Todavía atrapada en la pequeña ciudad de Irlanda del Norte donde nació, trabajando para la agencia inmobiliaria de su padre, espera que un segundo matrimonio la ayude a recomponer su vida. Su hermana Liz, una profesora ferozmente independiente que vive en la ciudad de Nueva York, esta a punto de regresar a Ulster para la boda de Alison, antes de dirigirse a una isla frente a la costa de Papua Nueva Guinea para hacer un programa de television sobre la religion mas nueva del mundo. Ambas hermanas esperan escribir su propio futuro, pero el pasado tiene otras ideas. Alison se despierta el dia despues de su boda y descubre que su nuevo marido tiene un pasado del que ninguno de los dos puede escapar. Mientras que Liz, en una selva tropical al otro lado del mundo, se encuentra cada vez mas envuelta en el misterioso y cargado mundo de Belef, la carismatica mujer a la que ha venido a filmar, la lider de un nuevo culto. A traves de sendas hermanas, Dioses modernos hilvana una profunda e incisiva narracion sobre el peso actual de la historia, la violencia, la religion y la culpa en su Irlanda del Norte natal y las consecuencias del fanatismo en Nuevo Ulster, una isla de Papua Nueva Guinea. El norirlandes Nick Laird es un reconocido poeta y novelista, ganador de multiples premios internacionales. Autor de cinco poemarios y tres novelas, en Dioses modernos Laird nos sumerge en una valiente e innovadora novela donde traza las intimidades y decepciones de una familia intentando mantenerse unida bajo las repercusiones de la historia. Laird deslumbra ojo y oido con su prosa cinetica... Con un simple movimiento de descripcion, convoca vastas extensiones de politica e historia. JENNIFER EGAN, The New York Times

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