Plays & Poetry

An uplifting book filled with hope, faith and courage, with a message behind every picture, every story, every poem. Kilkenny author Claire Sinnott's debut collection of poetry and prose.

Diminished? Really? Gods don’t hold us, the temples wither, the priests are all in sales but the sun still shines, the oxen low and the winedark sea is still as dark as wine. ‘Peter Sirr draws on the classics — Homer, Catullus, Sappho — to ask if we, in comparison, live in a disenchanted world.

Diminished? Really? Gods don’t hold us, the temples wither, the priests are all in sales but the sun still shines, the oxen low and the winedark sea is still as dark as wine. Peter Sirr draws on the classics — Homer, Catullus, Sappho — to ask if we, in comparison, live in a disenchanted world.

“In the early 1990s, in his volume The Bears And Other Poems, Knute Skinner embarked on an extraordinary poetic project – the elaboration of short poetic fictions. In the intervening years he has become a master of this charged and compelling form. These short poems are exquisitely compressed narratives delineating and exposing lives often within a relational context. The narrators are a diverse bunch: adulterers, deviants, adventurers, lovers, friends, whose utterances and scraps of dialogue frame the foibles, truths, frailties and enduring alliances between characters strewn across a variety of contexts. In some of the poems there is an undisclosed but implied secret that entreats the reader to return, to name what has been conflated and intuitively sussed, and to define the intriguingly elusive and alluring truth of the poem. There are very few books of poetry that you would run back into a burning building to retrieve. Make no mistake, An Upside Down World is one of them.”