Some Integrity

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021In "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.