Padraig Regan Some Integrity

Annotation

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 wehappen to be sitting inis dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whateverportion of the sky that happensto be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. Theweather also happens,as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other placeswhere 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.