English Martyrs

The title poem of Conor Carville’s second collection takes off from a London church and its congregation, but pushes on out into planetary, even cosmic dimensions. In another poem, the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett appears in the TV room of a London mental hospital, to tell the strange story of a mass on Clapham Common in 1984, when the London-Irish assembled to celebrate his beatification. These poems, and many others here, reassert the capacity of song to grasp the shape of a life, a community, or a world, in the shadow of its vast disorder. Sometimes lyric, sometimes violent, this is a book that teems with the martyrdoms, both everyday and epic, that punctuate our lives.