Shark Nursery

Eigse Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2018"The Shark Nursery" consists of three interlocking parts: poems arising directly from lockdown, poems about lives lived in an online reality, and animal poems. The animal poems draw on the rich tradition of animals in Irish poetry and myth. From the wolf's touch to the rat's tweet, animals and fish refuse to accept the roles human beings impose on them. The rat tells us his ancestor was famous for eating the vellum of the Book of Leinster and helping us to date it. This is based on analyses of droppings found on old manuscripts for the purposes of dating and authentication. No-one thanked him, he says, not even a mention in a footnote. The animals find new language in the face of contemporary perils. In a space before noise begins tigers visit cities and a white leopard sits on a lawn in Suburbia. In the strange, almost hermetically sealed world portrayed in the "Ballad of Googletown" – an eerie, genuine ballad, where the familiar tropes and refrains of ballad are hung out to dry – lives are lived online, virtually no social interaction is necessary:"...cars are in the driveAnd the bees are in the hiveThey say the kids are safe insideIn Googletown"