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Miriam Gamble's poetry is cleverly self-conscious about the doubleness of language: as resistant, resisting medium, and as the lightly worn currency of the everyday. Remarkable for its imaginings of both the animal world and the human, her first full-length collection The Squirrels Are Dead encompasses an urgent sense of social engagement as well as a profound sense of mystery, in which language is journeyed through as an almost-familiar landscape. Gamble is a mistress-manipulator of tradition - with sonnet, villanelle and sestina some of the forms on display - who forces new rhythms into tried and tested forms, yet is ever vigilant to the fact that poets do not replace, they update, and that tradition comes to fresh life in the retelling. "The Squirrels Are Dead" is a striking and assured debut from a distinctive new talent in Irish poetry.
Price: $16.95
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date:
23 June 2010
ISBN: 9781852248680
Format: Paperback
Miriam Gamble was born in Brussels in 1980 and grew up in Belfast. She studied at Oxford and at Queen’s University Belfast, where she completed a PhD in contemporary British and Irish poetry. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2010. Her pamphlet, This Man's Town, was published by tall-lighthouse in 2007. Her first book-length collection, The Squirrels Are Dead, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010 and won her a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. Her second collection, Pirate Music, was published by Bloodaxe in 2014, and her third, What Planet, is out from Bloodaxe in May 2019. She lectures in creative writing at Edinburgh University.