Gub

'Gub is unlike anything I have ever read. In a playful demotic that is exhilarating, hilarious and never forced, Scott McKendry makes magic of a Belfast that in other hands would make grim reading. The most exciting poet to come out of the north of Ireland in many years' Louise Kennedy, author of Tresspasses 'There is nothing else like this in Irish poetry. A lyrical savant of the highest level, and one of the most exciting writers in Ireland today, McKendry is utterly his own beast' Michael Nolan, author of Close To Home Hauling the language of Belfast's ghettoised working-class into contemporary Irish poetry, Gub bears witness to the balaclava'd gunmen, urban warlords and explosions of the final decade of the 'Troubles'. Wearing the lyrical influences - Morrissey, Carson, McGuckian, Longley - of his 'ugly city' lightly, McKendry's tightly-wrought structures weave an unprecedented poetry of witness, wittiness, mourning, alienation and alter ego. Gub comes to terms with generational trauma, social decay and the rituals of a place with a fraught history and an uncertain future.