Continuing City and Other Poems is my forthcoming poetry collection from Bonfire Books. It includes 50 pages of original poetry along with my verse translation of The Voyage of Saint Brendan.
Continuing City is a book about the longing for a world that’s “realer than the one I’ve wandered here.” It is often apocalyptic in tone, with strong influences ranging from science fiction to, as one poem states, “the Bible, Dante, and Tarkovsky.” These poems take you on a journey from the mundanity of the modern city through mythological seascapes and mountaintops, always in search of an enduring homeland.
The book’s mythological journey is of course most full exemplified in my translation of The Voyage of Saint Brendan, which see its first complete publication in this book. There has been a great deal of interest in this translation since I first posted about it, with an excerpt, here. If you’re not familiar with the story of Saint Brendan, it’s wild. An Irish monk (a real historical person and a saint in the Eastern and Western churches) sails across the ocean searching for Paradise, and encounters many adventures along the way. He chats with angels disguised as birds, sails through Hell, and celebrates the Eucharist on the back of a sea monster.
If all goes well, Continuing City will be published on Saint Brendan’s Day, May 16, 2027. Stay tuned for more news!
The title poem, “Continuing City,” won first prize in the inaugural ESU Formal Verse Contest, judged by Stephen Edgar, winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Stephen Edgar said the following of “Continuing City”:
“What struck and impressed me about this poem was the way the form to some extent enacts the content. The formal regularity of the iambic pentameter and the strict rhyme scheme—both handled with skill—are shaken and pulled apart by enjambment and sentences which lie at odds with that rigid grid, mirroring the disruptions to the city’s stable forms by demolition and construction. Repetition of key words creates a sense of urgency, or even panic, and, literally rising above the damaged cityscape, the poem builds to a dystopian vision of the future.”
Listen to me read “Continuing City” below:
Here are some sample poems from the collection that have been published online:
“Talking Saint Brendan Blues” (in Traces Journal)
Excerpt from “The Voyage of Saint Brendan” (in New Verse Review)
“The Archive of Readerless Books” (in Autumn Sky Poetry)
“The City of Letters” (in The Brazen Head)
“The Butlerian Prohibition Against Thinking Machines” (in New Verse Review)
“Undigested Jonah” (in Traces Journal)