Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets by Pat Boran

In Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets, more than 50 poets from all over the world explore the many meanings and connotations of the word ‘home’. Hailing from places as diverse as India and Italy, Poland and Pakistan, Canada and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – as well as the US, the UK and Ireland itself – together they present an updated picture of a changing country while, at the same time, expanding the very definition of ‘writing from Ireland’.

The poems gathered here are as various and lively as we might hope for. Some contributors might be said to ‘write home’ in the traditional sense, describing and explaining what they find in the place they now live; for others ‘writing home’ is a determined, creative act of self-definition.

For all of them there is the real sense that writing is itself a kind of home-building, not least at a time when so many borders, physical and psychological, are under threat of closure across the world.