News of Launch of four new titles by Dedalus Press, including Eleanor Hooker’s debut poetry collection ‘The Shadow Owner’s Companion’

Eleanor Hooker’s debut collection of poetry, ‘The Shadow Owner’s Companion’ is being launched by the Dedalus Press at the Irish Writer’s Centre, 19 Parnell Sq. Dublin at 7pm on Wednesday February 1, La Fheile Bride.  Eleanor’s book is available at the bookshops in Nenagh or directly online from www.dedaluspress.com

Leeanne Quinn is also launching her debut poetry collection ‘Before You’.  Leeanne holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin on the American writer Philip Roth.

A reissue of leland Bardwell’s 1987 short story collection, ‘Different Kinds of Love’ will be launched on the night. Leland will soon be celebrating her 90th birthday.

Award winning poet Paddy Bushe has published many collections of poetry, his latest collection, ‘My Lord Buddha of Carraig Eanna’ is being launched on the same night.

Biog. Details (from Dedalus Press website www.dedaluspress.com)
ELEANOR HOOKER lives in North Tipperary. She has a BA (Hons. 1st) from the Open University, an MA (Hons.) in Cultural History from the University of Northumbria, and an MPhil in    Creative    Writing (Distinction) from Trinity College, Dublin. She was selected for the Poetry Ireland    Introductions Series in 2011. Her poetry has been published in journals in Ireland and the UK. She is a founding member, Vice-Chairperson and    PRO    for the Dromineer    Literary Festival. She is a helm and Press Officer for the Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. She began her career as a nurse and midwife.

Eleanor Hooker’s debut collection of poems is a rich and sometimes unsettling book, full of warm presences, but also open to an otherness, at best glimpsed or half-heard but nonetheless reall. If childhood might be called a persistent whispering on the other side of the door, the poems in this collection attempt to hear that voice, mapping out the landscape between the interior childhood world of terror and wonder and the exterior adult world of surreal reflections.

LEEANNE QUINN was born in Drogheda in 1978. She has studied at University College Dublin, University College Cork, and holds a PhD in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Her poems have been published in a variety of magazines and journals. She lives in Dublin.

Loss and memory. The poems of the first section of Leeanne Quinn’s debut collection, Before You, explore the intimacies of a sibling relationship, and revisit it from a distance travelled since, where new experience is “the earth’s irreproachable / response to your absence”. Pain is evoked, sensed never far from the surface, but the telling remains oblique, the particulars refusing a simple summary or conclusion.

Life goes on, in what one of the poems in the second section calls “this awful business of living”, a variant on a phrase by Elizabeth Bishop whose letters, in counterpoint to the book’s first section, prompt and provide an external departure point and reference.

LELAND BARDWELL was born in India, grew up in Leixlip and was educated in Dublin with extra mural studies in London University. She has published five novels, most recently Mother to a Stranger which was a bestseller in translation in Germany, while her early novel The House was recently issued in their classic series by Blackstaff Press. Numerous radio plays and stories have been broadcast on RTÉ radio and her stage plays include The Life of Edith Piaf. Her most    recent    poetry collection is The Noise of Masonry Settling (Dedalus, 2006). Her memoir, A Restless Life, appeared in 2008 from Liberties Press. The recipient of the Marten Toonder Award in 1993, and the Dede Korkut Short Story Award from Turkish PEN in 2010, she is a co-editor of the long-running literary magazine, Cyphers. A member of Aosdána, she lives in County Sligo.

“She is the doyenne of women poets writing in English. Her work has humour and wit… It has the immediacy of personal conversation, yet is crafted with care for form. She makes something extraordinary of ‘ordinary’ experience”
—Irish Press

“Leland Bardwell’s poetry is witty, full of sharp, intimate honesty, full of truth and surprises. She is a poet who has felt the shocks of our time, the private impacts and the historic changes”
—Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

PADDY BUSHE was born in Dublin in 1948 and now lives in Waterville, Co. Kerry. A prize-winning poet in Irish and in English, his collections include Poems With Amergin (1989), Teanga (1990), Counsellor (1991), Digging Towards The Light (1994), In Ainneoin na gCloch (2001), Hopkins on Skellig Michael (2001) and The Nitpicking of Cranes (2004). To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poems was published in 2008. He edited the anthology Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael (Dedalus, 2010). His latest collection is My Lord Buddha of Carraig Eanna (Spring, 2012). The recipient of the Oireachtas prize for poetry in 2006, he also received the 2006 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award. He is a member of Aosdána.

“Despite the tough tone of Bushe’s poetry, reflecting its material, there is an intelligent sensitivity always at work that does justice to the more tender of human experiences”
– The Irish Times

“… the voice adroit and confident, the poems strong, supple, sophisticated and articulate. ”
— Macdara Woods,  Poetry Ireland Review.

” … an adept handling of form, with a wry awareness of the limitation inherent in any formal discipline”
—Peter Denman,  Irish University Review.

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