Gerard Hanberry’s fourth collection explores the fragility of existence in a world where greed, violence and the inevitability of death is counterbalanced by the tenderness found in a loving relationship where ‘we joke of cosy lead-lined coffins built for two, / elaborate arrangements for death and for sex...’. In the title poem, the discovery of the world’s oldest shoe combines with the execution of a prisoner in Ut...
Gerard Hanberry’s fourth collection explores the fragility of existence in a world where greed, violence and the inevitability of death is counterbalanced by the tenderness found in a loving relationship where ‘we joke of cosy lead-lined coffins built for two, / elaborate arrangements for death and for sex...’. In the title poem, the discovery of the world’s oldest shoe combines with the execution of a prisoner in Utah to reveal the fact that ‘not a lot has changed in five millennia’. It is a world ‘we can’t depend on’ like the great slab of limestone at the cliff’s edge where lovers sit only to discover it is undercut. The evidence of random collapse lies all about. The tone achieved in many of these lyrical reflections on life, on love, on loss, is sometimes wry but not pessimistic and a smile or a loving gesture strengthens one’s toehold on a brittle world hurtling beneath our feet.
Gerard Hanberry is an award-winning poet living and working in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. This is his fourth book of poems and follows on his 2009 collection At Grattan Road, also from Salmon Poetry, a collection the Irish Times said was ‘bursting at the seams with fine poems’. Gerard Hanberry has also published a biography of the Wilde family More Lives Than One – the Remarkable Wilde Family Through the Generations (The Collins Press) and 'On Raglan Road - Great Irish Love Songs and the Women who Inspired Them' (The Collins Press / Gills) . He delivers a creative writing module at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He lives, overlooking Galway Bay, with his wife Kerry.
