Bloodaxe Books | Ailbhe Darcy reads from Insistence in Newcastle @BloodaxeBooks | Uploaded October 2018 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
A new child should mean new hope. But what if that’s no longer so? Ailbhe Darcy’s second collection INSISTENCE unfolds in an intimate world, in which the words ‘home’ and ‘love’ dominate. But the private world is threatened by a public one. Written in the American Rust Belt, in an era of climate change and upheaval, INSISTENCE takes stock of the parent’s responsibility to her child, the poet’s responsibility to the reader, and the vulnerability of the person in the face of global crisis. INSISTENCE has just been shortlisted for the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize. In this excerpt from her reading (with Finuala Dowling) filmed by Neil Astley at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts on 11 October 2018, she reads six poems from the book: ‘Nice’, ‘After my son was born’, ‘A guided tour of the house and its environs’, ‘Ansel Adams’ Aspens’, ‘Silver’ and ’Still’. The collection also includes a long poem, ‘Alphabet’, in which she revisits Inger Christensen’s 1981 ALPHABET, a work which expresses the heart-sickening persistence and proliferation of beauty after Hiroshima, but in Darcy’s poem the spiralling form takes over, insisting on hope. However, this is a doubtful sort of hope: hope for life on earth, not necessarily human life. Stink bugs work their way across America, cockroaches waltz, and quixotically-named mushrooms rise from the earth in this flirtatious but volatile collection. For more details see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/insistence-1177
A new child should mean new hope. But what if that’s no longer so? Ailbhe Darcy’s second collection INSISTENCE unfolds in an intimate world, in which the words ‘home’ and ‘love’ dominate. But the private world is threatened by a public one. Written in the American Rust Belt, in an era of climate change and upheaval, INSISTENCE takes stock of the parent’s responsibility to her child, the poet’s responsibility to the reader, and the vulnerability of the person in the face of global crisis. INSISTENCE has just been shortlisted for the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize. In this excerpt from her reading (with Finuala Dowling) filmed by Neil Astley at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts on 11 October 2018, she reads six poems from the book: ‘Nice’, ‘After my son was born’, ‘A guided tour of the house and its environs’, ‘Ansel Adams’ Aspens’, ‘Silver’ and ’Still’. The collection also includes a long poem, ‘Alphabet’, in which she revisits Inger Christensen’s 1981 ALPHABET, a work which expresses the heart-sickening persistence and proliferation of beauty after Hiroshima, but in Darcy’s poem the spiralling form takes over, insisting on hope. However, this is a doubtful sort of hope: hope for life on earth, not necessarily human life. Stink bugs work their way across America, cockroaches waltz, and quixotically-named mushrooms rise from the earth in this flirtatious but volatile collection. For more details see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/insistence-1177
