Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854115492
Publication date: October 10, 2011
Price: £8.99
Out of stock
‘What separates The Salt Harvest from many first collections is a willingness to look for the poetic in pretty much anything, an almost aureate diction, and a darkly exuberant style’ – The Guardian
‘Walls wields a voice which strikes out on its own and, like all the best poetic voices, seems almost entirely to lack antecedents … here, “praise be”, is a voice bringing something really new’ – The Edinburgh Review
Shortlisted for the DLR Strong Award (in partnership with Shine) at Poetry Now / Mountains to Sea
The Salt Harvest is the debut collection from a startling new talent, Eoghan Walls. Dark and evocative, these poems involve rich, multi-layered descriptions of the natural world, and cast a sardonic and tender eye on the human condition. All the climates of his native Ireland inspire both the muscular imagery and the complex forms of work such as ‘Star of the Sea’, ‘Cockles’ and the title poem; each line has been ‘packed with ore’. Also apparent is an ambivalent, often deeply ironic attitude towards a culture once steeped in religion, as in ‘Myrrh’ and ‘Confessions to the Southwest’. Threads of humour run throughout, an imaginative playfulness evident in ‘Martin Healey’s War on God and Ireland’, ‘Frog’ and ‘Star Matter’.
Listen to Eoghan Walls read his poem, ‘The Martians’:
Eoghan Walls
Eoghan Walls is a Northern Irish poet. Born in Derry, educated in Wales and Ireland, he has lived in Germany, Rwanda and now teaches Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He has published two previous collections of poetry with Seren Book – The Salt Harvest (2011) and Pigeon Songs (2019) – and two novels with Seven Stories Press – The Gospel of Orla (2023) and Fieldnotes from an Extinction (2026) – and translated the first major volume of Heidegger’s poetry. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006 and has been shortlisted for many other awards, including the Manchester Poetry Prize and the Piggot Poetry Prize. He currently lives with an array of daughters and occasionally goes jogging. Elsa and the Wolfman (2026) is his third collection of poetry.
