The Sun is Open

Winner of the 2022 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize

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.Winner of the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize Winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize 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. Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life. 'Each page of The Sun Is Open is rich with exquisite and surprising language, pain, and wisdom.' - Maggie Nelson 'The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant, from Wendy Houses, to the very hairs of your head, to the poetry of First Aid instructions, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking - sometimes pain-making work - making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses. A series of ethical considerations and transactions, credits and debits that sometimes demand to be accounted for, or judged, or at least spoken of in the light of whatever the forensics might or might never unfold.' - Ciaran Carson Poetry book of the month - the Observer A TLS book of the year