Salmon Poetry podcast

Orla Martin-Somewhat Vortex

Somewhat Vortex, the debut poetry collection by Orla Martin, is a response to the ebb and flow of life. Landmarked by loss, by love, by hope, the work is underscored by a warm and witty thread. A singular and somewhat staccato style brings into focus a unique take on the banal, the absurd and occasionally a robin. Angled over life, the poet seeks to understand andconnect the zig zag of people, the jagged and plume with lambent portraits of family, epilogues to love and a view from the poetry spectrum. Some poems are the flotsam and jetsam of error, others are rare bright star bursts of content. There is a guest appearance by Wilson, the emotional support blackbird. There are Tuesday clothes. There could have been many more references to Radiohead. There are poems that may create something beautiful, perhaps.
There is something wonderfully theatrical about Orla Martin’s debut collection Somewhat Vortex, with many of its poems begging for a mike and a captive audience. But like all theatre, behind the drama, the irony, the self-deprecating wit lies the quiet pain and hard-earned joy of what it means to be human. Remember, not too much of yourself, it scares themoff – the poem’s narrator reminds herself, but these poems insist on having their say, unexpectedly revealing through playful and clever use of language, the darkness as well as the light – leave me untamed, uneven, odd, hopping for my life down the street. Short and sweet, with a satisfying sting in its tail, Somewhat Vortex will have you standing in your seat, shouting ‘More!’-Anne Tannam
 

Celeste Augé: I Imagine Myself

I Imagine Myself is for anyone who has ever imagined they were someone (or something) else. A powerful collection that asserts the freedom to have a visible midlife as a woman, to have difficulties in a relationship and work through them, and to weather the storms of ageing. In ambitious and dynamic poems, I Imagine Myself gives voice to the experience of trying to discover a new self, tracing an arc through illness, middle age, connections to other people and the natural world.
 
Celeste Augé is the author of The Essential Guide to Flight (Salmon Poetry, 2009) and the collection of short stories Fireproof and Other Stories (Doire Press, 2012). Celeste has a Masters degree in writing from NUI Galway. Her poetry has been short-listed for a Hennessy Award, and she received a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to write Skip Diving. In 2011, she won the Cúirt New Writing Prize for fiction. She lives in Connemara, in the West of Ireland, with her husband and son. 

Emer Fallon Thin Lines

What lies in those in-between spaces between ocean and land, earth and air? And what happens when we cross a line and enter that suspended space?
The poems in this collection explore the places we encounter between sanity and madness, sickness and health, the past and the present, and life and death, travelling from a Wicklow childhood to life in the West Kerry gaeltacht, and examining the many crossing points encountered along the way. 
Thin Lines is Emer Fallon’s first collection.

Eamonn Wall : My Aunts at Twilight Poker

The rich narrative poems in My Aunts at Twilight Poker provide nuanced and many-sided explorations of Irish and Diasporic life— with particular focus on Eamonn Wall’s hometown of Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, and on St. Louis, Missouri, where he had lived for the past two decades—as both have unfolded through the past century. 
 
Eamonn Wall is a native of Co. Wexford who has lived in the USA since 1982. In addition to his six volumes of poetry published by Salmon, Eamonn Wall has written two prose books: Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (2011) and From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish (2000). He lives in Missouri where he is employed by the University of Missouri-St. Louis as a professor of International Studies and English. Eamonn Wall serves on the board of Irish American Writers and Artists Inc., an organization founded to foster and promote the work of Irish American writers and artists. He is also a founder of Scallta Media—an initiative to promote the work of up-and-coming Co. Wexford creative artists.

Edward O’Dwyer: Exquisite Prisons

“Edward O’Dwyer’s poems in Exquisite Prisons pack the quotidian with a creeping terror; motorists nervously migrate to investigate the car stalled at the lights, a father is filmed throwing his child higher and higher, a husband wonders if his wife also fantasises about killing him. These poems are savagely ironic, authoritative and delivered in an unsettling coaxing voice that occupies that same dazzling imaginative territory as Shirley Jackson in The Lottery.”  Eleanor Hooker
 
“These are poems which explore the preciousness and unreliability of what we think of as 'the present'. They often unpick fleeting moments, but their impact is enduring. Highly recommended.”  Helen Mort
 
“In Exquisite Prisons, Edward O’Dwyer considers the reasons people need other people: to validate, reflect, desire, resist, and mourn.  These poems are surreal, sneakily funny and unashamedly sad.  The images will stay with you. O’Dwyer’s poetic voice is utterly contemporary and the poems have a wittily executed lightness of touch which charms the reader.”  Susan Millar DuMars & Kevin Higgins
 
Edward O’Dwyer is a secondary school teacher, poet and fiction writer from Limerick, Ireland. He has published three collections of poetry with Salmon, most recently Exquisite Prisons which appeared in 2022. It followed The Rain on Cruise’s Street (2014), which was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes, and Bad News, Good News, Bad News (2017), which contains the poem, ‘The Whole History of Dancing’, winner of the Best Original Poem award from Eigse Michael Hartnett Festival 2018. He has represented Ireland at Poesiefestival, Berlin, for their European ‘renshi’ project. He took part in Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and has been shortlisted for a Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry. His first short story collection, Cheat Sheets, was published by Truth Serum Press in 2018 and features on The Lonely Crowd journal’s ‘Best Books of 2018’ list. His poems and stories have been published in journals and anthologies around the world, both digitally and in print. He is the current Poet Laureate of Adare, Limerick, named by Poetry Ireland as part of their Poetry Town initiative.
 

Cahal Dallat: Beautiful Lofty Things

Neither object lessons nor exhibits in an esoteric cabinet of curiosities, Cahal Dallat’s poems, in Beautiful Lofty Things, spring from quotidian items and artefacts that connect poet and reader with an eclectic mix of people and places, from present-day Rajasthan, Slovakia, Kansas City and North Carolina via London, Montmartre and Morocco, to growing up in the Antrim Glens, and back through the unlikeliest of family heirlooms to Belfast and Ballycastle in the twentieth century's first half. 
 
Each inanimate object, its image facing the associated poem, animates the poet’s world of ideas and invention, thought and art, rumination and reflection, his quest for meaning in past and present, his exploration of events and individuals that shaped a personal identity.
 
Canal Dallat is a poet, musician and critic. He was born in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim and now lives in London.  He has contributed to BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review; winner of the 2017 Keats-Shelley Prize; founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project; 2019 joint Writer-in-Residence (with Anne-Marie Fyfe), Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory NC; 2018 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow, University of Texas, Austin TX; 2017 Charles Causley Centenary Writer-in-Residence, Launceston, Cornwall. Previous poetry collections include The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff). www.cahaldallat.com

Paul Perry: Jamais Vu

“Jamais Vu is a hall of mirrors. In these marvellous and haunted new poems Perry observes a life that may be his or may be ours. Nothing and everything matters. Yet all is exactly as it should be, glimpsed and unanswerable. A startling, disorentating, and tender book of poems.”
Annemarie Ní Churreáin
 
PAUL PERRY is the author of five full length collections of poetry including Gunpowder Valentine: New and Selected Poems, and two pamphlets of poetry from above /ground press The Ghosts of Barnacullia, and Blindsight. A recipient of the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship, he is also a novelist. He directs the Creative Writing Programme at University College Dublin. 
“A mystical and epic collection of iridescent poems: within are smooth, arrow-shaped flowers of memory, story, and a darkly tilted earth.
     Step into these worlds and pay attention to each word: they are all crucial clues to the sound of love.”
Gregory Betts
author of Finding Nothing: The VanGardes

John Griffin, Erosions

Erosions is John A. Griffin’s first full-length book of poems. Written shortly after he emigrated to the United States, the poems comprise a kind of Bildungsroman exploring themes of boyhood innocence, fantasy, landscapes, nature, death, loss, absence, exile, and a coming into one’s powers as one seeks to apprehend the changes wrought by time, epiphany, and departure. Absence, lines, natural forces, spirituality, and extinction are all leitmotifs in the book, as these combine to displace a burgeoning identity rather than overtly defining one. 
 
John A. Griffin was born and raised in Tipperary, Ireland, and emigrated to the USA in his early twenties, where he read for his BA, MFA, MA, and PhD, specializing in German Idealist Philosophy as it laid the groundwork for British Romantic Aesthetics, especially the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose proposed though unwritten Opus Maximum was the subject of his dissertation. He has published poems & essays in literary journals, and two chapbooks, After Love and Absences - A Sequence. He recently emigrated again, and is now living and working in Saudi Arabia, where he is the Academic Director in a private, international school. Erosions is his first book.

Susan Rich Gallery of Postcards and Maps

''The new and selected poems of Gallery of Postcards and Maps introduce themselves with a warmth that deepens into wisdom. Susan Rich finds music in everything inside and outside her windows: Leonora Carrington, Vegetarian Vampires, lovers and ex-lovers, Lorca and Courbet. These terrific poems are full of compassion, lyricism and attention. The selected reflects an ever-present restlessness of spirit, flesh, and intellect.''- Terrance Hayes

Elvis Alves Blackfish

Listen to poet Elvis Alves reading from his latest poetry collection: Blackfish.
 
Blackfish locates beauty in the horrid and strange that constitute familial and social history.
 
“Elvis Alves’ book Blackfish is a moving and powerful collection of poems both immediately accessible, and rich with complex allusions that move smoothly from the Bible through to Jazz and Reggae, current affairs, and genetic inheritance. The book presents poetry about diaspora and displacement, about class struggle, servitude and oppression, music, survival, love, hate, and every shade in-between. They are moving, personal, and universal, and every poem has the undeniable ring of painful but essential truth.''- Magdalena Ball, Author of Unmaking Atoms