Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2018

Nick Laird has been an assured and brilliant voice in contemporary poetry since his acclaimed debut, To a Fault, in 2005. Feel Free, his fourth collection, effortlessly spans the Atlantic, combining the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird’s forebears, Heaney, MacNeice and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention and wit (here are elegies, monologues, formal poems and free verse) the poet explores the sundry patterns of freedom and constraint—the family, the impress of history, the body itself—and how we might transcend them.

Feel Free is always daring, always renewing, and Laird’s most remarkable work to date.

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Praise for Feel Free

“Excellent … the highlights of the book are love poems and city poems for the Information Age: the poet’s situations and relationships — as a father, a son, a husband—are sized up and filtered through different kinds of brilliantly manipulated language … compulsive and inventive … Laird’s best book yet.” –The Irish Times

“Throughout this outstanding collection, there is the sense of an elsewhere, at once tantalisingly close and unreachable … the greatest joy of reading this unmissable collection is Laird’s peripheral vision as a poet: the deer seen from a suburban train; the unplanned signature on a windowsill in deep red dust; the many glimpses of elsewhere.”—The Observer

“[Laird] finds himself entering the heartland of middle age. It’s bittersweet for the writer but rewarding for the reader … There is a satisfying masculinity to the collection … ‘Incantation’ borrows lines from Frank O’Hara and Kurt Vonnegut to make something particularly beautiful.”—The Sunday Times

“Few contemporary poets can make old poetic forms feel natural and lyrical the way Laird can … The collection’s driving concern [is] is it possible to feel free when hemmed in by mortality? Laird’s poetry offers a tentative “yes” by way of skillful fluidity in the face of captivity.”—London Magazine

“Laird transports the speaker and the reader to some other place, and returns you, a little changed … his poems are beautiful.”—Manchester Review

“Feel Free shows this exceptionally gifted poet extending what is by now a real range.”—TLS Books of the Year 2018

In The Zoo of the New, poets Nick Laird and Don Paterson have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. Above all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a powerful timelessness: words with the thrilling capacity to make the time and place in which they were written, however distant and however foreign they may be, feel utterly here and now in the twenty-first century.

This book stretches as far back as Sappho and as far forward as the recent award-winning Denise Riley, taking in poets as varied as Thomas Wyatt, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Frank O’Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks along the way. Here, the mournful rubs shoulders with the celebratory; the skulduggerous and the foolish with the highfalutin; and tales of love, loss and war with a menagerie of animals and objects, from bee boxes to rubber boots, a suit of armor and a microscope.

Teeming with old favourites and surprising discoveries, this lovingly selected compendium is sure to win lifelong readers.

“So open it anywhere, then anywhere, then anywhere again. We’re sure it won’t be long before you find a poem that brings you smack into the newness and strangeness of the living present. ” –from the Introduction

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About the Editors

Nick Laird, born in County Tyrone in 1975, is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and lawyer. His poetry collections, published by Faber and Faber, are To A Fault (2005), On Purpose (2007) and Go Giants (2013). A new collection, Glitch, is forthcoming. His novels are Utterly Monkey (2005), Glover’s Mistake (2009) and Modern Gods (2017). Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. He is Professor of Poetry and University of St. Andrews, Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan, and has for many years also worked as a jazz musician. His poetry collections with Faber and Faber include Nil Nil (1993), God’s Gift to Women (1997), Landing Light (2003), Rain (2009) and 40 Sonnets (2016). He has also published translations of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as books of aphorism and criticism. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Costa Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and all three Forward Prizes; he is currently the only poet to have won the T.S. Eliot Prize twice. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009.

A powerful novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended, from an award-winning author with “a wonderfully original and limber voice” (The New York Times)

“Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in gorgeous language…[with] fierce tenderness. ” –Dave Eggers, author of Heroes of the Frontier

Alison Donnelly is back where she started: a single mother of two, she works for her dad’s estate agency in a small town in Ulster, but hopes her new fiancé will be a fresh start. After the wedding, her sister Liz, an anthropologist based in New York, heads to Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about Belef, a charismatic female leader who has started the world’s newest religion, the Story.

Equal parts thriller and a novel of ideas, Modern Gods ingeniously braids the stories of Liz and Alison as they learn how to negotiate with the past and with the sins of fanaticism, and decide just what the living owe the dead.

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Praise for Modern Gods

“Laird dazzles ear and eye with his kinetic prose … With a mere flick of description, [he] summons vast stretches of politics and history … The dynamism Laird has conjured in New Ulster … keeps us reading, and the tragic climax resonates powerfully with the Northern Ireland sections of the novel.” –Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review

“Laird sets out to mix the intimate family drama with the epic novel of ideas … Full of bull’s-eye sentences and sharply drawn characters … Laird handles it all with tremendous dexterity, energy, and compassion.”—The Sunday Times (London)

“An exceptional work of literature. It also fulfills its duty as a corrective to our collective idiocy by reminding us what we’ve forgotten: at bedrock, it says, we’re all just confused, lonely, yearning, terrified of death, and desperate for love.”—The Irish Times

“Nick Laird’s prose disseminates unease– a sure sign of originality. The aura of danger derives not so much from his theme (how religious faith is inseparable from violence) as from his sensibility: the reader feels the ever-present likelihood–the risk–of confrontation with unpalatable truths. Laird is a poet-novelist; his fictional world may be harsh and raw, but is balanced by the imaginative habits of a poet, which always tend toward forgiveness and, indeed, toward celebration.”—Martin Amis

“A richly textured geography of the human need to believe in something, and of the stories, religious and secular, that we live by … Has a grave, melancholy grace.”—The Guardian (London)

“[A] roving, ambitious novel … The taut prose propels the story and describes the process by which people ‘make a future by entering into ethical relations with the past.’”—The New Yorker

“In Modern Gods, Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in gorgeous language, with the same fierce tenderness as he employs in his poetry. It’s about families, tribes, peoples– and if you’re a member of any of those you’ll find a home both strange and familiar in this story.”—Dave Eggers

“Laird’s overarching concern, for individuals trapped by politics and religion, carries Modern Gods along on a tide of vigorous compassion.”—The Times (London)

“[Nick Laird] weaves a wide-ranging, globe-trotting novel in which two sisters content with issues of identity, politics, and belief.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Modern Gods has realer-than-real characters, unexpected turns of plot into unknown corners of the world, and language that finds its way through the darkest moments and states of mind to shine its clear bright light, revelatory and unforgiving. And it encompasses deep—the deepest, thorniest—questions of faith and redemption, fate and forgiveness.”—Michael Chabon

“An agile domestic drama, split between Ireland and Papua New Guinea … [Laird] effortlessly switches location and point of view without sacrificing the empathy we feel for each character.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“With Modern Gods, Laird marks himself out as a first-rate novelist, applying his virtuoso linguistic skills and acute ear for dialogue to a subject—religion—that is rarely well-handled in fiction … Laird’s book does what great novels do, using its humor to illuminate the deepest reaches of the human experience.”—Financial Times

“Nick Laird knows a great deal about violence, physical, emotional, and spiritual, and how it eats into the lives of both survivors and perpetrators and continues to corrode, like a slow-acting acid. Modern Gods is a big, tightly packed book that lives up amply to its high ambitions.”—John Banville

“Society’s darkest impulses are on graphic display in Laird’s novel … [He] is alive to the way that moral certitudes tend toward violence.”—The Wall Street Journal

“[Laird's novels] are—in different contexts, and different ways—about the problem of being born into an identity … He takes as his material everyday things, but for the purpose of showing how ordinary life is in fact complicated and extraordinary.”—The New Republic

“Modern Gods is at once remorselessly clear-eyed about human frailty in the aggregate, and full of loving kindness for human beings as individuals. The taut prose reveals a poet’s hand, and the dialogue a playwright’s ear; Laird can nail an entire character in one acutely perceptive description, and richly suggestive transitions crystallize the truths of well-wrought scenes. Ferociously intelligent, radically contemporary, deeply affecting, stunning”—Matthew Thomas

“Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in gorgeous language…[with] fierce tenderness. ” –Dave Eggers, author of Heroes of the Frontier

Alison Donnelly has suffered for love.  Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, working for her father’s real estate agency, she hopes to pick up the pieces and get her life back together.  Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent college professor who lives in New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison’s second wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world’s newest religion.

Both sisters’ lives are about to be shaken apart.  Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape.  In a rainforest on the other side of the planet, Liz finds herself becoming increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the subject of her show, a charismatic middle-aged woman who is the leader of a cargo cult.

As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison, it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide just what the living owe to the dead.  Laird’s brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the repercussions of history and faith.

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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. But these are brave, resolute writings that resist despair at all times, affirming instead the need to rebuild and to right oneself, to dust down and carry on.

“Nick Laird’s To A Fault is doing more, in its range and ambition, than any first collection I can think of in at least the last ten years.” –Deryn Rees-Jones, The Independent

“Nick Laird’s first book of poems, To A Fault, is the most auspicious debut in Irish poetry since Paul Muldoon.” –Colm Toibin

Informed both by a sense of wit and by an undercurrent of melancholy, the book thoughtfully provokes concepts of happiness and sadness, of warring and reparation, of dissent and the abandonment of the religious for the secular. Frequently pivoting around familial relations, the volume concludes with a mercurial and affecting sequence about a marriage, which takes as its point of departure that most influential of military treatises, The Art of War.

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Praise for Go Giants

Nick Laird is the author of two previous collections of poetry, On Purpose and To a Fault.  His honors include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Born in Ireland, he lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.

“Easily his most accomplished [collection] to date….[Laird] gives everything of himself in a poetry as expansive and thought-provoking as his considered response to an infinitely complicated universe needs it to be.” –The Guardian

“Displays an almost child-like wonder in the variety and slippage of language, alongside an adult sensibility of its boundless possibilities and dangers….Here are some of Laird’s most successful and mature poems.”—The Times

“An intricately woven display of memory, passion and learning … impressive … startling.”—Sunday Telegraph

“Both playful and powerful … Wonderful … At his frequent best he finds the right voice to address and calm the fears of past and future times.”—Daily Telegraph

“Undoubtedly [Laird's] most accomplished, fully realised and ambitious collection to date … fiercely intelligent and pursuasive … It’s only fitting that it is a poet of Laird’s skill who reminds of the rewards that are reaped by language that is hard won and powerfully executed.”—Irish Post

“Go Giants is both passionate and thoughtfully constructed. Anyone with an interest in the continuing evolution of Irish poetry will want to read it.”—Irish Times

With infectious wit and energy to burn, Utterly Monkey is a searing, fiercely funny, and ultimately redemptive novel about surviving an office job, outwitting the bad guys, and, hopefully, getting the girl.

“Part caper movie, part coming-of-age story, part urban satire, Utterly Monkey introduces a writer with a wonderfully original and limber voice… Laird uses his razor-sharp eye for detail and ear for how regular people talk to give us an ebullient cast of characters, rendered with an idiosyncratic mixture of sympathy and wry humor.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“An extraordinarily accomplished novel, by a confident and eloquent voice, filled with humour and insight.” –The Sunday Times

“The real thing; a novel rich in both achievement and promise.” –The Times

With wit, compassion and acuity, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance – “The Death of Love in Modern Culture”, a as David puts it in one of his dyspeptic blog posts – among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve real happiness.

“Written with real panache and frequent sparklings of brilliance…detail by detail, image by image, Laird evokes both David’s seedy world and Ruth’s rich and pampered bohemia with real expertise and imaginative flair.” The Guardian

“A fine, thoughtful piece of work that combines a compelling plot with pithy insights into the relationship between creativity and criticism; between art and those who make their livings skulking in its shadow.” The Times