Description
About the books:How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net by Ellen Dillon
How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net is a work of hybrid lyric-essay by Ellen Dillon that moves between elegy, translation, and ecological witness, finding its gravitational centre in a pencil sketch by Barrie Cooke of two figures hauling a pike from a boat on Lough Gur. From that image, the book spirals outwards: into Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, into the Irish-language poetry of Seán Ó'Ríordáin and the sustained presence of Fanny Howe, into questions of what is lost or hardened when Irish metaphor is rendered into English, and into the changing condition of the lakes themselves. The book's form is restless and self-aware, moving between prose meditation, collaged verse, close etymological reading, and a composite poem that interweaves Ó'Ríordáin and Howe's own words, while remaining anchored throughout in the physical particularities of lakeshore, birdsong, and weather.
Landscape with Question by Leeanne Quinn
Through a series of intricately patterned ‘landscape’ poems, the east coast of Ireland and the medieval town of Drogheda are set against and alongside the central European city of Vienna and the banks of the River Danube as the real and imagined align and ask questions of each other. What is present beneath the surface of a city? What trace of time does a river or sea still hold? Landscape with Question is the first creative work to extensively engage with one of Ireland’s leading Modernist artists, Nano Reid. The temporal and geographic layers of Reid’s paintings, the complex psychological interiority of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, the movements of tides and the pattern of human and animal life in urban landscapes all serve as constellations for the speaker of this pan-European quest narrative by award-winning Irish poet Leeanne Quinn.
About the authors:
Ellen Dillon is a poet and teacher from Limerick, Ireland. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Prototype Prize for artists and writers working at the intersections of different literary and artistic forms, and was Arts Council of Ireland Writer in Residence at University College Cork in 2025. She has published books on the life and work of Fernand Deligny, the history of butter in Ireland, Stephen Malkmus’s guitar, Stéphane Mallarmé’s teaching career, and the ghost of Townes Van Zandt.
Leeanne Quinn’s debut collection of poetry, Before You (Dedalus Press, 2012), was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. Her second collection, Some Lives (Dedalus Press, 2020), was noted as a Book of the Year by The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. She co-edited Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (Dedalus Press, 2022) and is the editor of Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2025). Her poems have been widely anthologised, appearing in The Forward Book of Poetry 2013, Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916, Hold Open the Door: A Commemorative Anthology from The Ireland Chair of Poetry, and Queering The Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Originally from Drogheda and Monasterboice, Co. Louth, she has lived in Germany, Austria, and is now based in Limerick, Ireland.
| Period | 28 Jul 2026 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Waterstones, Ireland |
| Degree of Recognition | National |
Keywords
- Poetry