The Sun is Open by Gail Mcconnell

The Sun is Open by Gail Mcconnell

The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. This startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life.

'To sit with the unspeakable, to spell it out in alphabet spaghetti, using only the letters given to you that day; to spell death using the adverts in the cash and carry; to spell life using the names on sweet wrappers, is extraordinary workThe Sun is Open is a work of extraordinary emotion, written with extraordinary control. It is also - perhaps extraordinarily - a work of joy.'-Joanna Walsh, 'The Sun is Open is like fragments of a broken window reassembled into startling new form and meaning. The fragments include the Bible, press reports, personal memories and the archives of William McConnell, Deputy Governor of the Maze prison and the poet's father, who was murdered by the IRA in 1984. The reassembling - usually into squares and boxes of type with fragments of sources - presents us with the jagged memorial of a broken time.'- George Szirtes, 'The Sun is Open brings us 109 pages closer to knowing that raging absence in the wake of violence, in the wake of love; the wakefulness that persists. The poem is history as postmodern text - all middle, no endpapers, no polite intermission or lapses of memory. This book's freedom of thought is not taken lightly, but gloriously, celebratorily. Gail McConnell is a force.'- Caoilinn Hughes

Gail McConnell is a writer and critic from Belfast. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather and Fourteen. Gail’s poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Blackbox Manifold and Stand, and she is the recipient of two awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast and the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave, 2014). Gail’s writing interests include violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781908058928
ISBN 10	1908058927
Title	The Sun is Open
Author	Gail Mcconnell
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penned in the Margins
Year published	2021-09-15
Number of pages	126
Prizes	Winner of John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2022, Winner of Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize 2022
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.