A suite of surrealist poems from a brilliant new voice in Irish poetry. An after party suggests admission by invitation, nod and wink, code. Where things get interesting after the official event is over, night bleeds into day, memory and imagination interleaf. Musicians strike up in the corner. The after party of this collection hints at an ontological paradox: the party at once here and gone, the celebration of simultaneously being present and the hushed afterwards into which the exuberance of being is always vanishing. In these poems, the ecstatic sensuousness of being alive is threaded with elegy, for others, for the selves shed. The romantic imperative to be as physically and imaginatively alive as possible against the awareness of eventual disappearance. A suite of poems engages in a process of creative mishearing, exploiting the possibilities of dream language to bring English at times to the edge of sense, destabilizing everyday logic, drawing out richness and singularity from the numbed quotidian, making it apprehensible afresh to the senses. Miscommunication is by turns ruefully and playfully dramatized in a sequence of poems on a questionable relationship, as the gulf between inner lives remains stubbornly impassable. Tipperary, the author’s home town, has one of the highest rates of death by suicide in Ireland. This, and the housing crisis, are subtly reflected throughout, as is the author’s working-class background. After Party, though youthful in ambience, is death-haunted, elegiac, laced with dark humour.
