This second collection by Northern Irish poet Adam Crothers, whose first book won the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, includes sonnets and prose poems, anxiety and swagger, confession and nonsense.
Beginning with an account of the simplest-seeming island people and their troubled though productive lives, this work continues with a series of poems about King David, great poet and warrior, which consider the ineffectuality of war and the place of poetry in building towards a just society.
A fresh, contemporary take on the Christian faith in an increasingly secular world from one of Ireland's leading poets - a timely collection for our unstable and cynical times.
"The Blind Stitch" is a book which is sewn together with two main conceits. One is the leper conceit, which is the stitching of personal and public suffering and inescapable complicity; the other is the varied line of stitches, seen and unseen, that connect our private and public lives.
Dramatic Monologues from a dressmaker on laudanum and a stenographer in love with a young revolutionary give their alternative views of the Irish Troubles and the Civil War.
Imelda thinks she's killed her mother by wishing she was dead. Haunted, she doesn't want to wish the same fate on Justin, her twice-widowed father, owner of McConnell's bar and shop. When Imelda's two sisters, disapprove of Justin's fiance, Clodagh, Justin butters up naive Imelda and elevates her to the position of temporary favourite.