bandit country

by James Conor Patterson

ISBN: 9781529092776

Published: 2022

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 T.S. ELIOT PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE bandit country, the much-anticipated debut collection from James Conor Patterson, is a rollicking, hyper-literate and at times deeply troubling account of a young man's navigation of the semi-lawless borderlands between the north of Ireland and the Republic - the 'bandit country' of the Troubles - and the criss-crossed sea border to England and beyond. Patterson shows us how the militarised boundary line of old has morphed into an invisible and semi-wild frontier, where the ghosts of a thirty-year war continue to haunt the 'ceasefire generation'. Patterson writes in a hybrid dialect of Newry street and Scots and Irish-inflected English - and in a virtuosic variety of forms: these poems crackle with vernacular wit and the rhythms of everyday speech, absorbing the influence of the poet's Belfast mentor, Ciaran Carson, and the radical poetics of Tom Leonard. Already a...