94 political poems of the period 2005 to 2013 written by a bemused non-political bystander. Mostly concerning Irish national politics, there are some local and international issues dealt with, usually through humour or biting sarcasm. This is not a diary of Ireland PLC from the days of the Celtic tiger through the crash to the new Land of Recession; rather these are issues that caught the poet's eye, fired his imagination or got beneath his skin. Warning, many of the poems rhyme and scan perfectly.
A look at the season of Christmas and winter through the medium of light verse, 'The Arse End of the Year' chronicles the build up to the festive season, the solstice, the day itself and the post-Christmas slothfulness, together with aspects of the cold and dreary winter season so beloved by, well, not many people actually. From the reindeer shaped blips on the air traffic controllers' screen, to the disappearing cheese portions; from forgetting auld acquaintance to the difficulty of burying dead bodies in frosty weather, Peter Goulding gives us a uniquely personal insight into the season in his inimitable style, not that many people would want to imitate it.
Peter Goulding's fourth, or maybe fifth, (who's counting?) book of comic verse again delves the murky depths of the poet's imagination. There are still plenty of poems about murdering his wife and disposing of her body but there are darker poems too - the proliferation of tomatoes on Jupiter, the birth of Princess Charlotte and his critiques of the counties of Tipperary and Offaly, to name but four. His mind, which, to be frank, would be put to much better use, learning a trade or simply vegetating, is again employed solving many of the world's problems in rhyming couplets, villanelles and other fiendish weapons of mass destruction. Comes with a cultural health warning.
In the Waterways Department of the Irish Government, an employee discovers that his last four Hobnobs have been stolen. At approximately the same time, twenty miles away, twenty three packets of Rich Tea biscuits have been lifted from a supermarket in Ashbourne. This is unprecedented in Irish and, indeed, world history. Chief Inspector Jacobs, who had helped to solve the infamous Chocolate Digestive theft of 1994, is summoned to solve the crime before the social order crumbles. Can Jacobs wrap up the case and drag Ireland back from the brink of anarchy? How do they get the figs into the fig rolls? And what is the lighthouse thing about? The Island of Broken Biscuits is a comic novel set over five days. It holds the World Record for mentions of Custard Creams (55) and has been rejected by many, many publishers.
A poetical diary of the 2014 World Cup written in extremely bad verse. The author set himself the target of writing a poem per match and posting each of them up on www.footballpoets.org within 12 hours of the match finishing. Why he did this is a mystery. He hasn't even been arsed to go back over the poems and edit them. This is a sister book to The World Cup 2014 in bad verse and glorious technicolour which at least has the dubious advantage of brightness.
Joanna Fuhrman's sixth poetry collection is a fearless blend of the real and the surreal, the political and the personal, all with the marks of her own kind of accelerated dizzying style that nevertheless brings you along with it. "Fuhrman's got her own funky brand of blended surrealism and fabulism going on in To a New Era. The poems in this tour de force offer funicular modes of language transport, making it a dizzying, dazzling joy to be a commuter on this collection (see 'Adjunct Commuter' poems). Sentience abounds; metamorphoses are in the poetry's plasma. Formal poems emit a flirty, contemporary spirit of rebellion. Political poems are pissed, hilarious, iconoclastic, in debate with language's complicated connotations, histories, and alternate histories. In To a New Era, Fuhrman toasts to the cyclones that blow through our days and our nights. This collection is one storm of words that will bowl you over! " -Martine Bellen
The 2005 League of Ireland season was another epic. Champions Shelbourne had a mid-season slump despite having strengthened the squad; arch-rivals Shamrock Rovers were deducted 8 points for being millions in debt; Cork lost Dolan but gained Rico and snatched the title from Derry on the last day of the season; the Superdrogs won the Cup; and Rico lost his hat. All these events and more were recorded by Peter Goulding in verse form at the time. Sadly, he has now decided to publish them.
The 2006 League of Ireland season will be remembered by Shelbourne fans for different reasons. It was the season that we played some of the best football seen at the club. It was the season we clinched the title on the last day of the season. It was the season the club was nearly destroyed by financial problems. It was the season of Stuey Byrne's rant. The poems in this book tell an unfolding tale that charts the highs and lows of a remarkable season.
The nineteenth century was a time of 'movements' - political, social, moral reform causes - which drew on the energies of men and women across Britain. This book studies radical reform at the margins of early Victorian society, focusing on decades of particular social, political and technological ferment: when foreign and British promoters of extravagant technologically assisted utopias could attract many hundreds of supporters of limited means, persuaded to escape grim conditions by emigration to South America; when pioneers of vegetarianism joined the ranks of the temperance movement; and when working-class Chartists, reviving a struggle for political reform, seemed to threaten the State for a brief moment in April 1848. Through the forgotten figure of James Elmslie Duncan, 'shabby genteel' poet and self-proclaimed 'Apostle of the Messiahdom', The Poetry and the Politics considers themes including poetry's place in radical culture, the response of pantomime to the Chartist challenge to law and order, and associations between madness and revolution.Duncan became a promoter of the technological fantasies of John Adolphus Etzler, a poet of science who prophesied a future free from drudgery, through machinery powered by natural forces. Etzler dreamed of crystal palaces: Duncan's public freedom was to end dramatically in 1851 just as a real crystal palace opened to an astonished world. In addition to Duncan, James Gregory also introduces a cast of other poets, earnest reformers and agitators, such as William Thom the weaver poet of Inverury, whose metropolitan feting would end in tragedy; John Goodwyn Barmby, bearded Pontiffarch of the Communist Church; a lunatic 'Invisible Poet' of Cremorne pleasure gardens; the hatter from Reading who challenged the 'feudal' restrictions of the Game Laws by tract, trespass and stuffed jay birds; and foreign exotics such as the German-born Conrad Stollmeyer, escaping the sinking of an experimental Naval Automaton in Margate to build a fortune as theAsphalt King of Trinidad.Combining these figures with the biography of a man whose literary career was eccentric and whose public antics were capitalised upon by critics of Chartist agitation, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in radical reform and popular political movements in Victorian Britain.
