Poetry

Leaving home, returning home, catching trains and ferries, watching the weather from the window of a hospital or hotel room, renewal and self-betrayal: these are the starting places of Gray’s poetry.

From her superbly accomplished first books Tactics and The Problem of Evil, to this, her sixteenth book of poetry, Maiden’s style has evolved from bitingly tense portraits and narratives with echoing dialogues and soliloquies, constructed in heightened, almost visionary imagery, to a more direct quasi-conversational tone.

MTC Cronin is a restless poet. Since her debut collection Zoetrope: We see us moving (1995) was published as part of Five Islands’s now defunct ‘New Poets’ series, she has released another seventeen books, including her latest offering The World Last Night.