Double Negative - Vona Groarke 88pp

A decade after Next to Nothing, Chris Agee’s critically acclaimed and achingly powerful collection of poems in memory of his daughter Miriam, Blue Sandbar Moon explores with delicate precision the emotional and spiritual landscape of a life sustained in “the aftermath of aftermath.”

I step forward, breathing fast. Movement. I force myself to take another step. I think about all of it, all of the deaths and all of the accidents and all of the pain... and I know what I need to do.

Poets from the new Irish communities, the so-called hyphenated Irish, the Irish of mixed cultural, linguistic or ethnic origin, gather here to chart and reflect the changing nature of Irish society. Addressing the broad theme of home, these writers, who hail from all over the world, explore some of the most complex and pressing issues of our time: identity, belonging, ownership and culture, often bringing fresh and startlingly new perspectives to familiar concerns. The result is a fascinating anthology in which home is both a place of origin and the place towards which we are always travelling, in the process celebrating our similarities and our differences both.