21st Century Renaissance

An Irish medic finds healing for himself by writing poems on his phone as the pandemic grips. Rhythm, rhyme, haiku, a list poem of what to do when someone can’t breathe (and why you wouldn’t kneel on their neck), why Lionel Richie keeps sending him emails.

A selection of collective nouns illustrated by Nick Geoghegan with haikus by Alison Hackett and Arnie Yasinski. Children's book (aged 0-5). Includes a caravan of camels, a conspiracy of lemurs, a tower of giraffes. Beautifully illustrated in rich colours throughout. 32pp, 210mmx285mm, laminated cover.

A volume of poetry by Alison Hackett published by 21st Century Renaissance. A memoir of love and loss. The voice of a twelve-year-old emerges through the lens of a fifty-two-year-old in the opening poems. Family and home, people and place anchors this debut collection by the author of The Visual Time Traveller.

Alison Hackett’s political opinions have been published more than 120 times as letters to the editor in the Irish Examiner, Irish Independent, The Irish Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Belfast Telegraph, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times and the Independent UK . Now they are published in one compendium – Yours etc – divided into chapters Irish Politics, Brexit & Britain, Women, America, Europe, Law & Democracy, Education, Science Sex & Morality. Printed by Dundalgan Press in Dundalk, Ireland; hand bound in red linen cloth by Duffy Bookbinders in Dublin, ireland.

A second collection by Alison Hackett including the poems published in the US since 2021. Death is an underlying theme — but death calmed to a less frightening thing as the author is comforted through knowing that those gone live on, in her mind, in her words, in the others who also share the loss. This collection is about innocence lost but also regained and the power of love to overcome loss.

An American makes sense of living in Ireland with his second wife; knows his difference is noticed when he opens his mouth to speak; how the stasis of Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ is everywhere — in the inertia of an underlying passivity he hears again and again, “it’s how things are done here”; knowing how darkness can be camouflaged, how the Irish avoid pain by averting their eyes from the abyss.

A second collection by Arnie Yasinski, “God Lives in Norway and Goes by Christie”. Anchored in his present life in Ireland (swimming at the Forty Foot in the opening poem, "Changing") Arnie reflects on his peripatetic past including being one of the young men in the 1969 U.S. draft lottery for Vietnam, living with his wife and child in married-student housing in Indiana.