Books by Nick Laird

To a Fault, Nick Laird's debut collection, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; On Purpose, his follow up, won a Somerset Maugham award for travel writing. In Go Giants, his third and most ambitious volume, Nick Laird's poetry travels yet further afield, connecting the shores of his native Northern Ireland with those of the American east coast where he spends increasing time. The result is an almost trans-Atlantic fusion, an inventive melding of Ulster lyricism with proto-Beat rhythms and phrase. The author's gaze is longer and more penetrative than before, casting back across the ocean to find a fresh perspective on older questions while vividly capturing the vibrancy of the new. Nick Laird writes with wit and candour, with polemic and persuasion, with no subject seemingly too large or too small: weapons of mass destruction, sectarian violence, religious faith, Jonah and the Whale, marriage, fatherhood, a daughter. A profoundly versatile collection, equally capable of public crescendo and a more personal hum, Go Giants is a daring and a thrilling endeavour by a writer described by Colm Toibin as 'an assured and brilliant voice in Irish poetry'.

A collection of poems that takes care and consideration in examining the often brutal arena of human relations, concluding with a mercurial and affecting sequence about a marriage, which takes, as its point of departure, that most influential of military treatise, "The Art of War".

In this impressive debut, Nick Laird explores the sharp edge of relationships, from the intimacy of lovers to the brutality of political violence. Formally deft, rhetorically fresh, these poems never shy from difficult choices, exploring cruelty and vengeance wherever they may be found: in love, in work and against political backdrops.