Airs

Maurice Scully has published several books of poetry over a long writing life, most recently Play Book (Coracle Press, 2019) & Things That Happen (Shearsman, 2020). Things That Happen (1981–2006), is an 8-volume work, revised, corrected & collated as a large single volume for Shearsman, representing a unique achievement in modern Irish letters. A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric, a collection of essays on his work including bibliography & interview with the poet, appeared from Shearsman in 2020. This new work, Airs, shows Scully, at 70, at the height of his powers.

‘Scully has a mesmerising capacity to choose ordinary words, to a large extent words that anyone could find themselves saying, & by cleaning off their edges & exactly composing their syllables, transform them from roadstone into fresh-washed pebbles … brilliance extracted from the everyday…’ —Tony Baker, Golden Handcuffs Review on Things That Happen

‘Scully is keen to fissure the generalized notion of ‘process’ that underwrites a good deal of experimental poetry in order to understand it both as a mode of composition and reception. In Several Dances this fissuring occurs as an extended exploration of just how composition and reception are enmeshed within that network of shapes, forms, habits and orientations that we too quickly gloss as genre. Scully raises the stakes of this investigation by thinking across the arts…’ —Eric Falci in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric, on Several Dances

‘The books are meticulously planned, considerably sectioned, divided, subdivided and numbered … but can you genuinely find your way around? It’s Borgesian … both planned and haywire, with parallelism, doubling back, intersections and loops, signposts bearing the same names pointing to different things.’ —Máiréad Byrne in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric on Things That Happen