Some Integrity - by Padraig Regan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021 In 'Minty, ' one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects: whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room we happen to be sitting in is dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever portion of the sky that happens to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The weather also happens, as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other places where it falls into the orbit of the glass. 'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world, ' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty.' The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.

Review Quotes

Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023

Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023

About the Author

Padraig Regan is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. This collection is the recipient of the 2021 Clarissa Luard Prize.