Up Late
This collection meets collapsing social and political systems, loss, and memory with a precise but flexible voice. Around a sequence on a father's death, it opens outward into loneliness, friendship, and the unease of everyday life.
Work Information
At its center is a sequence on a father's death, surrounded by reflections on loss and the instability of daily life.
Up Late shows how poetry can carry emotion and thought at once amid contemporary instability. Roughness and tenderness alternate, opening a personal elegy toward social feeling.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2023-06-01
- Pages
- 96 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 16.4 x 1.3 x 21 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571378678
- ISBN-10
- 0571378676
- Price
- 3441 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. At the book's heart lies the title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying, the reverberations of which echo throughout in poems that interrogate inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retrieved. Laird is a poet capable of heading off in any and every direction, where layers of association transport us from a clifftop in County Cork to the library steps in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a Kilburn garden. There is conflation and conflagration, rage and fire, neither of which are seen as necessarily destructive. But there is great tenderness, too, a fondness for what grows between the cracks, especially those glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, before the knowledge or accumulation of loss, where everything is still at stake and infinite, 'the darkness under the cattle grid'.
Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. A poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic and former lawyer, his awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Feel Free (2018) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. 'Up Late' - the title poem from his latest collection, Up Late (2023) - won the Forward Prize for Best Poem. He is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast.
Related Literary Awards
- Forward Prizes for Poetry Edition 31 (2022) ・Excellence Award