‘One of the true outstanding figures of the Irish Outrider Troubadour tradition'
Launched in London on 12th July 2023 — Dónall Dempsey's new collection
THE FOX, THE WHALE AND THE WARDROBE
THE FOX, THE WHALE AND THE WARDROBE
"This morning I finished reading your anthology The Fox the Whale and the Wardrobe. I enjoyed this collection of poems immensely.... I think you write in an unselfconscious and direct way which does justice to the experiences or emotions the poems contain. I think the language of the poems is imaginative and often playful, occasionally surrealist too. Your poems made me laugh, feel sad and reflect. This for me is what art is about." – Owen Ostler (a buyer of the book)
ISBN 978-1-913329-80-3
148 x 210mm, french flaps, 120 pages VOLE Books, RRP £10.99 |
In Dónall Dempsey’s sixth collection, published in spring 2023, he continues to explore themes of time and memory in poems that are playful, emotive, absurd, surreal, funny and moving.
Dónall Dempsey has mined the rich resources of his Irish childhood, his later life as ‘make-do Daddy’ and his great love of life to bring us this, his sixth collection of poems. We keep company with an uncle whose tales to nine-year-old Dónall cause an aunt to scold the adult for ‘filling the boy’s head with nonsense’, and with a little girl who constantly surprises and delights us with her discovery of meanings in life we have all but forgotten. The sorrow of loss is here, too: long-term personal grief since his beloved sister died when he was still a child, as well as the more recent deaths of his parents and younger brother, and the memories, happy and sad, of people he has met at the end of their lives. A film-noir enthusiast, in this collection he also unreels surreal narratives after gangster movies and murder mysteries. A child of rural Ireland, he gives voices to trees, rivers and stones and accesses their knowledge of time and the universe. And always his poems ring with his own joy in living and his vivid poetic imagination. 'An intriguing title leads the reader into a kaleidoscopic and scintillating poetry collection by Dónall Dempsey.
There is a great variety of wit and humour in these poems. ‘My Molecules are Revolting’ uses dialogue as a device to illustrate the repartee between the Universe and a couple of molecules that currently inhabit the narrator’s body while they wait for ‘the Big Bang/of Death’ and the chance of belonging to a more interesting formation in the future. An amusing concept but it is always Death that hovers in the background. In the title poem there is the nightmarish texture of an aunt’s fox-fur stole which has ‘beady eyes alive with death.’ Every item of clothing in the dark wardrobe is ‘rotten now/eaten by time.’ Everything once belonging to loved ones is dead. ‘I cry for the death of summer,’ says the narrator. ‘I cry for the death of them all.’... " — Mandy Pannett, writer, poet and editor. ‘Dempsey is a master of the short, unpunctuated line that draws us into his world step-by-step, and it’s a place where we want to be immersed. A library returns to the woodland the books and furniture are made of, so that we stand among trees. Beloved relatives are conjured up from what remains, perhaps no more than an inherited hat. Although minimalist, these poems reach into the deepest subjects, taking us to a future where birds remain to recall how humans caused their own extinction. Through it all, darkness and light are woven together with deft magic.’
— Adele Ward, writer, editor and academic ‘One of the true outstanding figures of the Irish Outrider Troubadour tradition, Dónall Dempsey is the oracle of the universal past, in whose hands the group mind of memory catches up with the present, outpaces it and advances into the future. In his sixth poetry collection, The Fox, The Whale & The Wardrobe, Dempsey once again inhabits all of his past moments, as son, nephew, father, partner, even objective observer; and the performative energy of the poems transfers those moments onto the reader, until we inhabit them also, and find ourselves performing as the very characters of the author's absurdist autobiographical folktale, where the poet is a Trickster surrounded by Tricksters, and reality flitters in and out, revealed as the greatest Trickster of them all.’
— John W Sexton, poet, novelist, short story writer and radio scriptwriter. |
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