Book description
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'.
