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Nightsongs for Gaia
by James Byrne
New and Selected Poems
Nightsongs for Gaia: New and Selected Poems spans over twenty years of James Byrne’s poetic practice. Accomplished in both formal and innovative modes, Byrne’s poetry is visionary, attentive and curious, encapsulating a global sensibility. Selecting from seven full collections and various pamphlets, Nightsongs brings together works unavailable in England until now. Here, we encounter a poetics that works with communities to further consider a sense of self and otherness and is unique in its musicality. Nightsongs celebrates the work of one of the most gifted poets of his generation.
James Byrne's poetry has always been lyrically complex, with a voice that is singular and instantly striking. What particularly strikes the reader of his Nightsongs for Gaia: New and Selected Poems is its capaciousness. This book takes us on a journey from his youth, via places of recent conflict such as Myanmar and Libya in way that few contemporary writers across the globe can match. He makes most poets writers today look like they’re jogging in a bathtub.
Nightsongs for Gaia presents alchemical fissures of a heart reduced to gold with no other substance to turn (in)to. A fiery presence of augury, of premonition, burns from the outset with a wary flame. Byrne has seen many places, been many things, and undergone visceral self-haunting in many guises. To say the Nightsongs are oracular is to understate the poet's own sense of knowingness. Here, exquisite beauty prevails.
James Byrne’s Nightsongs for Gaia is an extraordinary body of work—restless, urgent, and deeply humane. These poems move fluidly between the intimate and the geopolitical, tracing loss, exile, and resilience with a precision that is both unflinching and tender. Byrne affirms poetry as an act of witness and transformation. This is a vital, necessary collection.
ISBN: 9781911469841
Published July 2025
