Some Integrity
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:27th Jan '22
Should be back in stock very soon
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023
Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2023
Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023
Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022
Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021
In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects:
whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room we
happen to be sitting in
is dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever
portion of the sky that happens
to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The
weather also happens,
as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other places
where it falls into the orbit of the glass.
'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world,' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty'. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.
'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world'
Vahni Capildeo
'The poems achieve a thrilling tension... The author travels from specific, almost mundane, details to expansive ones, encompassing sensations seamlessly... In these lyric poems, so wonderfully held in the specificity of place, an engrossing self-consciousness propels us forward to perceive Regan's art and meaning-making.'
Alycia Pirmohamed, The Poetry Review
' a fresh and vital work...This is poetry which seeks to redefine the Irish lyric through the prism of a queer sensibility. Some Integrity stands on its own two feet as a playful, original and philosophically complex debit, as joyful as it is thought-provoking.'
James Conor Patterson, Business Post Dublin
'The thing I admire most in Padraig Regan's writing is its lightness of touch. The poems may be ambitious, but their beauty comes from the simplicity with which these ingredients come together. I don't think I've ever come across such joyful, vibrant work.'
Matthew Welton
'A fascinating new debut collection'
Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
'This scintillating debut is Whitmanesque in its freewheeling explorations of subjects ranging from mushrooms to Rembrandt to the landscapes of Ireland... there is a deft precision to Regan's work that is captivating. To read Some Integrity is to come away convinced that each poem is "a space... shaped to hold / the desire [the poet has] nowhere else / to put but here".'
Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian
'Padraig Regan’s playful, original and philosophically complex debut poetry collection is as joyful as it is thought-provoking. Here is a book which seeks to redefine the Irish lyric through the prism of Queerness, not just as a paean to sexual liberation, but as a way of making strange the repressive and familiar.'
James Conor Patterson,Irish Post
- Winner of Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023
- Short-listed for John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2023
- Long-listed for Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2023
- Long-listed for Polari Book Prize 2023
ISBN: 9781800172081
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
88 pages