Indie Publishers

The Sin-eater: A Breviary, Thomas Lynch’s fifth book of poems gathers together two dozen, twenty-four line poems – a book of hours – on the life and times of Argyle, the sin-eater and includes two dozen black and white photographic images by the author’s son, Michael Lynch, and a front cover watercolour by his son, Sean. The poems and images are situated on the West Clare peninsula in Ireland where the author keeps an ancestral home in the townland of Moveen between the North Atlantic and the River Shannon estuary. The poems are prefaced by an “Introit” which examines the nature of religious experience, faith and doubt, communion and atonement.

The new collection from one of Britain’s most popular poets, ‘The Toll’ is a tightly-wrought book on politics, family and a crumbling society that sees Luke Wright at the peak of his powers.

Stephen Sawyer’s remarkable first collection is a book about politics – public dreams, private desires and common fears. From a Merseyside housing estate in the 1960s via Pinochet and Thatcher to the floods in Sheffield in 2007, these poems trace the sutures of power and resistance on the body and under the skin through the mediations of love, death, class, art and oppression. They raise questions about identity and belonging in a time of rapid structural and technological change, and celebrate the creativity and courage of individual and collective responses. There Will Be No Miracles Here is a book of passion and humour about people who live at the sharp edge.

The clearly-focussed lyrics of Les Murray’s Waiting for the Past are rich in topographies and the languages peculiar to them – wonga vines, lyre birds, gum trees, shrike thrushes, tallow boughs, boab trees, the octopus in Wylies Baths killed by sterilising chlorine.

With the erasures the modern world brings, words, landscapes and lives descend to the Esperanto of the modern.

The poet, with a salutary resistance, rejects the computer and the incursions of the levelling Modern in favour of old-fashioned typewriters, unlikely saints, lived-in places, an Easter rabbit ‘edible and risen’, farming in the spirit of ancestors.

This is the past he waits for in scenes unmade by human carelessness, not only in his rural place but across the world.

The poems speak of the unspeakable, including old age, vertigo, illness, and the durable resilience of married love.