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Book Launch: Peripheral by Faye Boland

– poetry with a power to connect –

Posted 16 Sep 2018, 09:11

Peripheral by Faye Boland is the author's debut collection of poems, to be formally launched at Tralee Library in Co. Kerry on Saturday, 22 September, starting 2.30pm.

Faye Boland's poetry has been described as "a happy combination of musical lyricism and intellectual subtlety" by well-known Irish poet and novelist, Brendan Kennelly.

The poem from which this collection takes its title was Overall Winner at the 2017 Hanna Greally International Literary Awards, organised as part of the annual SiarScéal Festival in Co. Roscommon. It is also from this that the present volume results, as the prize, on this occasion, was for the winner to have his or her book published professionally by The Manuscript Publisher, an Irish-based publishing services provider.

In her citation of Boland's winning entry, the adjudicator at the awards, Mary Melvin Geoghegan, drew attention to the author's "economy and freshness of language", which she describes as "riveting – words forming as scaffold to arrest the eye and ear":

My roof is the sky,

the wind my walls.

Every night it blows

the same words:

Homeless.

Homeless.

Poet, Eileen Sheehan describes Boland's poetry ("recounted from an eclectic range of perspectives") as charting "a restless search for home, for purpose in an era when people feel increasingly disconnected from their own sense of worth."

So, where does one find that sense of self-worth? Our ability to connect is one place to start looking, or so this collection of poems might appear to suggest: the ability to receive and to acknowledge human distress signals, rather than trying to shut them out. Also, from the pleasure to be found in the mundane, reminding us that we are all somehow connected, no matter how dispersed and disparate our lives become.

Peripheral by Faye Boland is published by The Manuscript Publisher. It is on sale now and available to buy online, as well as from other outlets. RRP €12 plus P&P.

The book will be formally launched at Tralee Library, Co. Kerry on Saturday, 22 September, starting 2.30pm.