Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781724903
Publication date: February 28, 2019
Price: £9.99
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PIGOTT POETRY PRIZE 2020
Pigeon Songs is Derry-born Eoghan Walls’ second collection of poems from Seren after his much-praised debut, The Salt Harvest. From the first piece, ‘Angry Birds’ we have a sense of the poet’s themes and preoccupations: we have a richly metaphorical and densely allusive style, a pull towards formal metre and structures. There is also the occasional vigorous vulgarity, adding a touch of blue humour to the canvas, breaking up the formal rigour.
Family is a potent presence in poems inspired by parents, grandparents, partners, children. They often emit a sort of energy, a fierce gravitational pull of emotion around the burning heart of a poem ultimately about love, or the sorrow of losing a loved-one. There is frequently a strangeness that can be both comic, as in the ‘The Tooth Burier’, inspired by a child’s reaction to a lost tooth, and eerie as in ‘The Weight of Her’ where the child whispers that ‘she wishes to be dead’. Parenthood weighs large as alternately joyful, terrifying and essential to everyday existence. Also here is a richly imagined and mourned-for natural world as in ‘Ice Bear Dreams’; ‘The Sins of the Otter’; ‘The Beast of the Galapagos’; as well as animals in hybrid, mythological attitudes: ‘The Frog Prince’; ‘When All the Men Turned into Geese’ and the ever-present Pigeons who recur throughout the book as totems for various states of inquisition, rumination, urban living and means of temporary liberation from the mundane.
There is, as might be expected in an Irish poet, a flavour of lost religiosity as in ‘Sunday at the Reliquary’, echoing Heaney’s monks of Clonmacnoise in “Stepping back from the miraculous as we had known it.” Yet science provides its own unlikely, unearthly parables, like the scary, ‘Kepler 22B’ with a surface consisting of never-ending tusnamis. There are also riffs on ‘String Theory’, and ‘The Principals of Collision’. A socio-political awareness is never far away with poems about ‘Borders’ and particularly about a child’s drawing of refugees in ‘The Bright-Crayoned Universe’.
We are invited to stare, to mourn, to laugh, even to dance ‘The Rare Old Mountain Jig’ in this various, lively, compelling second book from the gifted Eoghan Walls.
Eoghan joined us at the Seren Stay-at-Home Series to read from his collections The Salt Harvest and Pigeon Songs. Watch it back on Youtube:
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.
“Formal metre and structure, by definition, don’t usually signify content that can flow free and wild. This is why Eoghan Walls’s Pigeon Songs is such a refreshing read. Its content, themes, tone and free word play are not what you might expect sitting within stanzas so formal. The juxtaposition of content and form give the reader a thrill.”
Liam Nolan, Gwales
“A lively, compelling second book from the gifted Eoghan Walls.”
Good Reads
“There is much to admire in this collection: the attention to poetic form in which Walls manages to contain his soaring, exuberant flights of fancy, the beautiful extended metaphor of the bee in ‘The Early Days’ and the finely controlled poem after “Kenneth Koch called ‘The Principles of Collision’ are just a few examples … Highly recommended.”
Neil Leadbeater, WriteOutLoud
‘Eoghan Walls is both incredibly literal and metaphorical, often within the same lines, and serious and frivolous. This is a neatly packaged collection of formally structured poems that defy a neat or structured synopsis.’
Liam Nolan
