PLEASE NOTE: ORDERS WILL NOT BE FULFILLED UNTIL NOVEMBER
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Niall McDevitt’s commanding new and final collection sees him return from Jerusalem to London via Babylon. These Londonist, dissenting, occultist poems take on as many forms as themes to reveal a linguistic shapeshifter in the Joycean vein. London Nation is a fourfold work in a beautiful hardback edition with artwork by Julie Goldsmith.
The eponymous first book depicts the city 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, Babylon, is inspired by his 2016 travels to Iraq to participate in a poetry festival staged amid the ruins of Babylon. It features modern adaptions of two ancient Babylonian poems, ‘Theodicy’ and ‘Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’, turning tables on the City of London and global neoliberalism.
Psychohistory, book three, assists the reader in time-travelling to Elizabethan London where McDevitt revives the forgotten poetic form of the masque. Decapitated heads on poles lament; the corpse of Christopher Marlowe throws a hissy-fit; a chorus of puritans hallows the plague.
A final book of free-form philosophical sonnets, In the Realm of the Isms, plays out the lyrical communiqué.
This bumper book offers a grand critique of Tory-Brexit-Covid England, but is blessedly unacademic.
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Niall McDevitt (1967-2022) is an Irish poet who spent much of his life in West London. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013), and Firing Slits, Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). He was poetry editor of International Times. His work is published widely, including in The London Magazine, Agenda, Boiler House Press, Love Love magazine, Ragged Lion Journal, History Today, The Oxford School of Poetry, Blackwell’s Poetry, The Idler, and The Palestine Chronicle. He is well known for his ‘poetopographical’ walks on Blake, Rimbaud, Chaucer, Emilia Lanyer, and many others. In 2013, he read at Yoko Ono’s Meltdown. In 2016, he performed his poetry in Iraq at the Babylon Festival. In 2020, he was commissioned to write new work for The Bard, a multi-media tribute to Blake at Flat Time House, Peckham. He collaborated with acclaimed Irish documentary filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle on works including The Battle of Blythe Road, James Joyce – Reluctant Groom, and a series of five films on William Blake and London. His blogs are available at poetopography.wordpress.com