Go Giants - Softcover

Laird, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571327508 ISBN 13: 9780571327508

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2015

Synopsis

To a Fault, Nick Laird's debut collection, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; On Purpose, his follow up, won a Somerset Maugham award for travel writing and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. In Go Giants, his third and most ambitious volume, Nick Laird's poetry travels yet further afield, connecting the shores of his native Northern Ireland with those of the American east coast where he spends increasing time.

The result is an almost trans-Atlantic fusion, an inventive melding of Ulster lyricism with proto-Beat rhythms and phrase. The author's gaze appears longer and more penetrative than before, casting back across the ocean to find a fresh perspective on older questions while vividly capturing the vibrancy of the new. Nick Laird writes with wit and candour, with polemic and persuasion, with no subject seemingly too large or too small: weapons of mass destruction, sectarian violence, religious faith, Jonah and the Whale, marriage, fatherhood, a daughter. A profoundly versatile collection, equally capable of public crescendo and a more personal hum, Go Giants is a daring and a thrilling endeavour by a writer described by Colm Toibin as 'an assured and brilliant voice in Irish poetry'.

About this title

Review:

An intricately woven display of memory, passion and learning ... impressive ... startling. (Sunday Telegraph)

[Laird's] third collection, is easily his most accomplished to date ... The book's ambition is impressive ... The collection is stitched together with great skill and complexity ... [Laird] gives everything of himself in a poetry as expansive and thought-provoking as his considered response to an infinitely complicated universe needs it to be. (Guardian)

Laird's new work again displays an almost child-like wonder in the variety and slippage of language, alongside an adult sensibility of its boundless possibilities and dangers ... Here are some of Laird's most successful and mature poems. (The Times)

Both playful and powerful ... Wonderful ... At his frequent best he finds the right voice to address and calm the feats of past and future times. (Tom Payne Daily Telegraph)

This collection swings between the zany and the scholarly, the groteseque and the beautiful, the child and the adult ... Very engaging. (Literary Review)

Undoubtedly [Laird's] most accomplished, fully realised and ambitious collection to date ... fiercely intelligent and persuasive ... It's only fitting that it is a poet of Laird's skill who reminds of the rewards that are reaped by language that is hard won and powerfully executed. (Irish Post)

Go Giants is both passionate and thoughtfully constructed. Anyone with an interest in the continuing evolution of Irish poetry will want to read it. (Irish Times)

Book Description:

In Go Giants, prize-winning poet Nick Laird returns with a third stunning collection.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0571327508
• ISBN 13: 9780571327508
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80