pandemonium – Andrew McMillan

£10.00

 

Flat rate UK Postage of £2.00 will be added to this order. Any additional books ordered are postage free

Description

*A ‘BOOKS OF 2021’ PICK IN THE GUARDIANFINANCIAL TIMES AND IRISH TIMES CULTURE*

After two prize-winning collections which examined the intimacies and intricacies of the physical body, McMillan’s third book marks a shift: both inward, into the difficult world of mental health, and outwards into the natural and political world.

Keeping his trademark breath-space and lower-case lines, but more formally experimental, incorporating sequences and sonnets, the poems in pandemonium explore the fragility and depth of the human mind – in its panic and its troubled retreat – and map this turmoil onto the chaos and abundance of the garden. Depression is mirrored in the invasive, seemingly untreatable knotweed that slowly suffocates the garden, while the sky conspires in its sudden, terrifying clarity, ‘as though the root of the world were ripped clean off’.

McMillan has been celebrated for his unflinchingly frank depictions of the body and sexual love, but these new poems are raw dispatches from a mind in freefall, a body in trouble. Addressing a period of acute depression, they are less about physical union and completeness and more about fracture and distance: tender, savagely moving poems which stare, unblinkingly, into the sudden havoc and hurt of this world, searching for – and finally finding – some redemption.

Andrew appeared at our 2019 festival being interviewed by Emma Dai’an Wright from The Emma Press. The following year he judged our poetry competition on the subject of Diversity and hosted our competition event. He also ran a workshop.

Price £10

ISBN: 9781787333192

Date: 20th May 2021

Format: Paperback

Extent: 96 pp

POETRY

Additional information

Color

Blue