Poetry from the UK & Ireland

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.

“Antony Rowland digs the word hoard to unearth
sinewy lines of dark material – the insides of buried
histories, public and private. He is an archaeologist
of mourning: always alert to the unexpected coinage
(‘Shram bobs the gracht’), these poems pay tribute to
people and places lost and found, whether teenage
kinship with the Brontës, a foreboding proximity to
the Yorkshire Ripper, or celebrations of absent
friends. Channelling infl uences such as Geoff rey
Hill and Tony Harrison, Rowland sets out a project
uniquely his own to rework history in these
‘measures against outrages’, always alive to poetry’s
‘guilty retrieval’. These are formidable sequences,
scrupulous to a taint, steeped in the earth.”

“In Antony Rowland’s Caldebroc England’s North
revivifies its aural mythmaking. There is a lyric
wildness here met with a sonic concatenation that is
breathtaking, precise and tireless – electrifying place
by refuting the nation’s view of its marginal regions.
Even geographical and linguistic departures bring a
paradoxical insiderly displacement. Rowland’s
poetics of defamiliarisation, of elsewhere’s
habitations within the already-known, ultimately
stands between us – and any sense of home – asking
us not where we belong but why.”

“It’s rare to find a poet so brilliantly dexterous with
language… In Caldebroc, the reader travels across time
and history – from the Brontës’ Haworth, to Icelandic sagas
and global financial meltdown. Rowland constantly revives
poetic language and,in doing so, uses the full artistic
palette. The effect is both ecstatic and celebratory.”