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- Corsair
- Corsair
Northern Ireland, Poetry
Stunning debut collection, bringing the ghettoised working-class into contemporary Irish poetry. Noisy, dark, but shot through with humour, Gub heralds a wholly new voice out of Belfast.
'Gub is unlike anything I have ever read. In a playful demotic that is exhilarating, hilarious and never forced, Scott McKendry makes magic of a Belfast that in other hands would make grim reading. The most exciting poet to come out of the north of Ireland in many years' Louise Kennedy, author of Tresspasses
'There is nothing else like this in Irish poetry. A lyrical savant of the highest level, and one of the most exciting writers in Ireland today, McKendry is utterly his own beast' Michael Nolan, author of Close To Home
'A distinctive and energetic voice' Sunday Times Ireland
'McKendry is a joyful liar, a storyteller... McKendry writes "life's not synonymous with pain" and it's this sense, of a kind of all-encompassing appetite, that marks him out as fine company' Declan Ryan
Demons, geese, The Laughing Cow, marching bands, LSD and pistols smuggled home from the USSR. You'll find all these in Scott McKendry's GUB.
Rooted in the language of working-class Belfast, and slipping between eras and time zones, closing the gap between the real and the fantastical, the academic and the everyday, the parish and the polis, McKendry's exhilarating debut collection comes to terms with generational trauma, social decay and the rituals of a place with a fraught history and an uncertain future.
Invoking the balaclava'd gunmen, urban warlords and explosions which gripped the decades either side of the Good Friday Agreement, GUB drags the language of ghettoised Belfast into serious Irish poetry. Wearing the lyrical influences of his 'ugly city' lightly - Carson, McGuckian, Longley - McKendry's tightly-wrought structures weave an unprecedented verse of mourning, witness, alter ego, class alienation and aesthetic turmoil.
Noisy, dark and witty, GUB is an utterly new voice out of Belfast, but one posting bulletins across inner-city neighbourhoods everywhere.
Praise for Gub
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McKendry does something truly radical with this book . . . Gub is one of the funniest books I've ever read, and one of the most moving. It parses the ironies, contradictions and shortcomings of the working-class Belfast I know with moments of incredible beauty. There is nothing else like this in Irish poetry. A lyrical savant of the highest level, and one of the most exciting writers in Ireland today, McKendry is utterly his own beast
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Scott McKendry's poems are exhilarants; richly textured, gregarious, sublimely sophisticated. The extraordinary ambit of his language . . . is interwoven, irrevocably, with its pleasures . . . Gub is a world you don't know and don't know you know. In the company of these magisterial, unique, frequently hilarious poems, you'll wonder where you've been
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Exhilarating: I think of Blake's 'Energy is an Eternal Delight' but it comes here with tremendous sophistication, flair and originality
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Unlike anything I have ever read. In a playful demotic that is exhilarating, hilarious and never forced, Scott McKendry makes magic of a Belfast that in other hands would make grim reading. From surreal, almost fabulous - in its purest sense - encounters with birds and animals, to trippy interrogations of identity and tradition, he makes the most surprising connections . . . The most exciting poet to come out of the north of Ireland in many years.
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