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Some Integrity

Padraig Regan

Cover of Some Integrity by Padraig Regan
10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, Bestsellers, First Collections, Irish, LGBTQ+
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (88 pages)
(Pub. Jan 2022)
9781800172081
£11.99 £10.79
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2022)
9781800172098
£9.59 £8.63
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023
    Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2023
    Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023
    Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023
    Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022
    Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021


    In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects:

    whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room we
    happen to be sitting in
    is dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever
    portion of the sky that happens

    to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The
    weather also happens,
    as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other places
    where it falls into the orbit of the glass.

    'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world,' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty'. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.
    Padraig Regan is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold a PhD on ... read more
    Awards won by Padraig Regan Winner, 2023  The Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
    (Some Integrity)
    Short-listed, 2023 The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize
    (Some Integrity)
    Long-listed, 2023 The Michael Murphy Memorial Prize
    (Some Integrity)
    Long-listed, 2023 The Polari Book Prize (Some Integrity) Short-listed, 2022 The Forward Prize for Best First Collection
    Winner, 2021 The Clarissa Luard Prize
    'The poems achieve a thrilling tension... The author travels from specific, almost mundane, details to expansive ones, encompassing sensations seamlessly... In these lyric poems, so wonderfully held in the specificity of place, an engrossing self-consciousness propels us forward to perceive Regan's art and meaning-making.'

    Alycia Pirmohamed, The Poetry Review

    'This scintillating debut is Whitmanesque in its freewheeling explorations of subjects ranging from mushrooms to Rembrandt to the landscapes of Ireland... there is a deft precision to Regan's work that is captivating. To read Some Integrity is to come away convinced that each poem is "a space... shaped to hold / the desire [the poet has] nowhere else / to put but here."'

    Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian

    'A fascinating new debut collection'

    Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph

    ' a fresh and vital work...This is poetry which seeks to redefine the Irish lyric through the prism of a queer sensibility. Some Integrity stands on its own two feet as a playful, original and philosophically complex debit, as joyful as it is thought-provoking.'

    James Conor Patterson, Business Post Dublin

     

    'The thing I admire most in Padraig Regan's writing is its lightness of touch. The poems may be ambitious, but their beauty comes from the simplicity with which these ingredients come together. I don't think I've ever come across such joyful, vibrant work.'
    Matthew Welton
    'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world'
    Vahni Capildeo
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