Bøker av Nick Laird

A powerful new collection from one of our leading contemporary poets, reflecting the strange and chaotic times we live in.

Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity, and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. These poems transport us from a clifftop in Ireland's County Cork to a bench in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a London garden.At the book's heart lies the Forward Prize-winning title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The reverberations of this knockout poem echo through the volume in its interrogations of inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retained. Amid rage, grief, and the conflagration of reality, Laird finds tenderness in the moments of connection that grow between the cracks and offers glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, where everything is still at stake and infinite.Astonishing in its emotional range and intellect, Up Late is a powerful volume from an "exceptionally gifted poet" (Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement).

Shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize An invigorating and heartbreaking new volume from "an assured and brilliant voice" (Colm Toibin) in contemporary poetry.

A powerful, thought-provoking novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended from one of our finest authors

Winner of the 2005 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature; winner of the 2005 Ireland Chair for Poetry Award; the only poetry book long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award.

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. 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 is 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'.

From a rising young novelist comes an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary London.When David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life.Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, in the sleek galleries and posh restaurants of a Britannia resurgent with cultural and economic power, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel vividly portrays three people whose world gradually fractures along the fault lines of desire, truth and jealousy. With wit and compassion, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance, among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness.

A collection of poems that takes care and consideration in examining the often brutal arena of human relations, concluding with a mercurial and affecting sequence about a marriage, which takes, as its point of departure, that most influential of military treatise, "The Art of War".

In this impressive debut, Nick Laird explores the sharp edge of relationships, from the intimacy of lovers to the brutality of political violence. Formally deft, rhetorically fresh, these poems never shy from difficult choices, exploring cruelty and vengeance wherever they may be found: in love, in work and against political backdrops.