1. Scott McKendry – Gub
McKendry’s debut is a smart, funny, occasionally mournful dissection of class dynamics and sectarian dividing lines in his native Belfast. Employing the radical phonetics of ‘everyday speech’ poets like Tom Leonard and Ciaran Carson, McKendry invigorates the loyalist idiom with new energy, making the Shankill area of northwest Belfast as strange and surreal as anything found in Dante.
2. Padraig Regan – Some Integrity
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.
3. Victoria Kennefick – Egg/Shell
Following on from the award-winning success of her first book ‘Eat or we Both Starve’, Kennefick’s second collection is described by her publisher Carcanet as “a diptych, a double album, which explores early motherhood and miscarriage, and the impact of a spouse's gender transition.” The result is a shrewd, mature, enlightening work of heartbreak set against the backdrop of a family’s shifting dynamics.
4. Mícheál McCann – Devotion
Few modern poetry books have so carefully grounded a speaker’s grief in the universal. McCann’s debut reimagines the domestic as a space, not only for the heteronormative structure of the nuclear family, but as a possible site for Queer escape. ‘Devotion’ interrogates the meaning of confessional verse in an era saturated by social media and online oversharing, resulting in a vital, Elizabeth Bishop-esque exploration of modern life in all its curious quirks and ordinary details.
5. Leontia Flynn – Taking Liberties
Flynn’s fifth book was written against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and continues the poet’s career-long transformation from enfant terrible of Belfast letters to Audenesque public intellectual. But Flynn is just as aware of her new role’s pitfalls, imbuing her work with a healthy cynicism about poetry’s ability to provide easy answers and a life-affirming reminder to pursue what we most deeply love.
