The Matter
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Publishing:24th Sep '26
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 24th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Following on from their decorated debut, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022 and won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023, Padraig Regan's The Matter deepens the ekphrastic concerns of their previous work, directing their gaze towards naturally occurring objects.
Divided into three parts of lyrical abundance - Animal, Mineral and Vegetable - the parts are linked by their attempts to imaginatively encounter the non-human (and at times, the inorganic) in ways that pay attention to the different formal or material possibilities of embodiment, and offer new foils for this remarkable poet's intense reflections on mortality and desire.
'In this fascinating, rigorous collection of poems Padraig Regan discloses the eros embedded in natural forms, even forms that seem to eschew form. From slugs to molluscs, from algae to succulents, from ammonites to gogottes: the poems address them tenderly as fellows that bruise or break like us, finding their bodily analogs in placentas and tumours and vertebrae.'
Ange Mlinko
'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world'
Anthony V. Capildeo
ISBN: 9781800175822
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
80 pages