David Toms

Reading can often have a serendipitous, almost conspiratorial feel to it - just as you begin reading about a topic, suddenly you notice it everywhere. It was there all along, of course, but you hadn’t yet thought to look for it - nor for…

David Toms lives and works in Norway. His new poetry collection is Northly from Turas Press. Which poets/writers most influenced you in your new collection, Northly? You know, it's hard to say whether…

Poetry as therapy usually produces dull work. It’s function is to aid a person in their recovery or to help them through a difficulty. Insofar as it helps the person writing it, it has value. For the reader though, it can be turgid. Aaron…

When the Gerald Dawe-edited Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets was published earlier this year, it drew a strong reaction from many who pointed out the collection of essays failed to properly take account of women’s contribution to the…

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual Irish writer, born in Galway in 1981. She writes both prose and poetry, in both Irish and English. Her books explore birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish…

There is a diffidence in the breezy dismissal of this collection’s title So Long, Calypso, that is at odds with the poems within, which are anything but diffident or dismissive. In this collection, Liz McSkeane treats us to poems that…

Driving through the 99 tunnel, a road that stretches through Seattle, if you pay attention you will notice on your left-hand side of the tunnel’s concrete walls graffiti which reads “Fuck Bezos”. This graffiti refers to multi-billionaire…

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be in Dublin at the same time that Poetry Ireland held an event at their building off Parnell Square on the place of Edmund Spenser in Irish poetry. The discussion involved Trevor Joyce, Leanne…

In the Winter 2015 issue of the The Stinging Fly Billy Ramsell invited poets to write what Ramsell called souterrains- a kind of layer below, an archaeology of the poems that would feature in the issue. These souterrains were…

Whenever you read anything, you are made conscious of your class. This is especially true if you have a working-class background. I was struck by this recently while reading Alberto Manguel’s essay collection Into the Looking Glass Wood in…