New River Press are proud to present a launch night party for Niall McDevitt’s LONDON NATION, an ambitious a four-book work in a beautiful hardback edition with artwork by Julie Goldsmith.
To reserve a free ticket and/or purchase a book or pamphlet, please click here.
McDevitt spent over five years on the work gathered here, then a year carefully editing several poetic projects together along with New River Press. Early copies of LONDON NATION returned from the printers on the day that Niall died at home, aged 55.
Please join us on Wednesday 16th November from 6pm at Ye Old Cheshire Cheese, one of the oldest pubs in London, and the place where McDevitt wished LONDON NATION’S launch to be. Copies of LONDON NATION and a pamphlet of a long, autobiographical interview with Niall, will be available to purchase. We will drink by candlelight and hear readings of McDevitt’s work. A nation of writerly ghosts drink with us: Yeats, Wilde, Orwell, Dickens, Johnson, Tennyson.
It is testament to McDevitt’s emerging mature style; bold, accomplished, dissenting poems that take on as many forms as themes to reveal a linguistic shapeshifter in the Joycean vein.
Book one depicts London as site of homelessness and pandemic, far-right politics, and power-buildings, but also contains some of his most overtly Irish poetry, as well as eulogies to such diverse cultural figures as Thomas De Quincey, Shane MacGowan, Julian Assange, and Ken Campbell.
The second book repurposes ancient Sumerian texts, rechanting strange old songs into crtiques of Neoliberalism. To write these stark, original songs McDevitt travelled to Iraq in 2016, where he participated in a poetry festival staged amid the ruins of Babylon.
The third devles into dark currents of Elizabethan London. Decapitated heads on poles lament; the corpse of Christopher Marlowe throws a hissy-fit; a chorus of puritans hallows the plague. McDevitt revives an old poetic form, the masque, where a rich medley of voices from the past surge.
McDevitt’s self-described ‘lyrical communiqué’ ends with free-form philosophical sonnets that savage orthodixies and take a stab at freedom.
PLEASE RSVP THROUGH EVENTBRITE – LINK AVAILABLE HERE