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The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx

Tara Bergin

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Categories: 21st Century, Irish, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
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(Pub. Jul 2017)
9781784103811
£7.99 £7.19
Paperback (88 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2017)
9781784103804
£9.99 £8.99
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize
    A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation
    Shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017
    Shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award
    Shortlisted for the Gladstone’s Library 2019 Writers in Residence

    Features the poem 'Bride and Moth', shortlisted for the 2017 Listowel Writers' Week Irish Poem of the Year Award


    Following her 2013 debut This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx. The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monologue as Bergin explores the alluring and sometimes tragic consequences of translation. When she committed suicide in 1898, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx, pioneering sociologist, and translator of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary) imitated Flaubert’s heroine, Emma. Both women, in their own ways, died passionate deaths, and Bergin’s poems are concerned with intense love, intense grief. With a sing-song rhythm and dark humour, they play off the natural theatricality of great lovers, great writers and great readers who, like the fancy-dressed children in ‘Mask’, are both ‘themselves and strangers’. ‘That’s all they wanted.’
    Tara Bergin has published three collections of poetry with Carcanet Press, This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry), The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes) and Savage Tales (shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize). ... read more
    Awards won by Tara Bergin Short-listed, 2023 The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
    (Savage Tales)
    Short-listed, 2023 The Pigott Poetry Prize (Savage Tales) Short-listed, 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award (The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx) Short-listed, 2017 Listowel Writers' Week Irish Poem of the Year ('Bride and Moth', published in The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx)  Short-listed, 2017 The T.S. Eliot Prize (The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx) Short-listed, 2017 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx) Commended, 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation  (The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx) Winner, 2014 Shine/Strong Poetry Award Winner, 2014 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection Short-listed, 2014 Irish Times Poetry Now Award
    'Eleanor Marx forms the locus for Bergin's exploration of the range of ways in which women's lives are disrupted and destabilized... this sense of the interior bleeds across the poems.'
    Ian Pople, The North, the Irish Issue
     'Loss, separation and desertion are all laid out for inspection as on a laboratory table to be coolly appraised... There is nothing cosy about Tara Bargin's poetry'
    Sean Sheehan, The Prism
    'Hers is an original voice of great power that flicks between speech and song, and between the borrowed and the wholly owned, with consummate ease.'
    W.N Herbert (Chair of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize Judging Panel)


    'Contains much hidden art, paring its gothic verse with an impressive precision of feeling and deftness of technique. All killer and no filler, it is the best book in contention.'
    Jeremy Noel-Tod on the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist, The Sunday Times


    'Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, wrote the first English translation of Madame Bovary, and it is Bovary's spirit that haunts these slender, allusive lyrics in many voices, all hint and subtext. The brilliant title poem concludes, with a wink, ''Nearly all of this is true''. One piece takes the form of footnotes to a missing page; it's the perfect symbol for Dublin-born Bergin's riddling second collection as a whole.'
    Tristram Fane Saunders, The Daily Telegraph


    Voted top of the poetry polls by Irish Times readers in the 2017 Ticket Awards 'Bergin's collection is ambitious in ideas and form. She juggles theoretical and formal concerns, slipping between jarring syntax and musical, lyrical phrases with an impressive ease that, at its best, mixes ironic detachment with authentic emotional response. This collection wrangles skilfully with allusion, fragmentary forms and the poet’s own processes of composition.'
    The Scores


    An Irish Times Best Book of the Year 2017 'Bergin's best poems have an atmosphere of unassuming sadness.'
    The Times Best Books of the Year 2017


    'The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx seems to step into the breach and breathe new, memorable ways into writing the underexplored past.'
    The Poetry School


     'Bergin's collection is a hall of mirrors and its reflections are comic, grotesque and extraordinary.'
    John Field on the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist newsletter


      'Bergin's Gothic imagination - precise, claustrophobic, yet full of vertiginous perspectives - makes her a perfect guide to these frightened, frightening times.'
    New Statesman


      'An exhilarating read, daring, original and very funny.'
    John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
    Praise for Tara Bergin 'Savage Tales is generous and humane and utterly compelling... Quite a lot of everything is within this extraordinary book.'
    Stephen Sexton, Irish Times
    'The poems, or poetic fragments, in Savage Tales seem to quiver with a strange, uncanny sense that something is always about to happen. Bergin's third collection manages to be both compelling and disturbing and yet also, somehow, filled with joy too.'
    Katy Mack, The Poetry Society


    'It is a book of puzzles, paradoxes, oddities and fragmented observations... these tiny stories feel sinister and unsettling'
    Andy Croft, Morning Star
    'Bergin succeeds in creating a clear voice and a dramatic situation. This is Yarrow is primarily a book of monologues, establishing voices whose skewed attitudes invite an engaged critical response from the reader. The monologues are sometimes reminiscent of Paul Durcan and at other times Sylvia Plath and they can be very cutting and funny at the expense of their speakers.'
    John McAuliffe, Irish Times
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