Books by Colette Bryce

A stirring poetry collection exploring family and grief from Colette Bryce, one of the most exciting Irish poets at work today.

Selected poems from the prize-winning poet Colette Bryce.

The dark attunes our eyes to detail the light can sometimes conceal; similarly, Colette Bryce's new poems are 'slant tellings' that reveal strange and true reflections. Using a wide range of imaginative strategies, Bryce examines the ways in which time is held, space enclosed - and a life framed and given meaning: a face in a broken mirror, a spider trapped under a glass, or a stolen kiss in a car-wash. Bryce's two previous prize-winning collections were widely admired for their marvellously seductive music and their speed of thought; Self-Portrait in the Dark widens and deepens the poet's scope, and is her most emotionally compelling collection to date. Praise for The Full Indian Rope Trick '[Bryce's] poems, sensitive as the needle that registers some distant earth tremor, are delicately poised . . . Bryce's vision is questing, disquieting, dark . . . as she seeks out the truths of life and love that transform the human heart. This is a confident, complex, subversive collection that shows us the magic by which one becomes a mature poet' The Times

The Whole & Rain-domed Universe is Colette Bryce's much-anticipated follow-up to Self-Portrait in the Dark. The book presents the reader with an extraordinarily clear-eyed, vivid and sometimes disturbing account of growing up in Derry during the Troubles, with many ghosts both raised and laid to rest. The Whole & Rain-domed Universe is a riveting poetic document of the time; Bryce turns her clear, singing line to darker ends than she has before, describing not just the warmth and eccentricity of family and the claustrophobia of home-life, but also the atmosphere of suspicion, and the real and present threat of terrible violence. Bryce is one of the most widely acclaimed poets of the post-Heaney generation, and this is her most directly personal and compelling work to date.

Colette Bryce's first collection is a book of songs: songs of kinship and desire, Ireland and Spain, of myth and belief. Bryce's sensuous and sinuous verse follows the convoluted lines of fate and political divide, and turns on questions of love and faith - the poet's relentlessly clarifying sense leaving them strengthened or shaken. In its insistent music - whatever dark and surreal turns it might take - Bryce's poetry is ultimately a celebration of singing and of singing out, for its own sake. The Heel of Bernadette announces one of the most unusual and distinctive voices to have emerged from Northern Ireland for a generation.