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Feel Free
Nick Laird has been an assured and brilliant voice in contemporary poetry since his acclaimed debut, To a Fault, in 2005. Feel Free, his fourth collection, effortlessly spans the Atlantic, combining the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird's forebears Heaney, MacNeice and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention and wit (here are elegies, monologues, formal poems and free verse) the poet explores the sundry patterns of freedom and constraint - the family, the impress of history, the body itself - and how we might transcend them.
Feel Free is always daring, always renewing, and Laird's most remarkable work to date.
Feel Free is always daring, always renewing, and Laird's most remarkable work to date.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Hardcover
First published August 2, 2018
7 people are currently reading
197 people want to read
About the author
Nick Laird
32 books110 followersNick Laird was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland in 1975. He read English Literature at Cambridge University, and then worked for several years as a lawyer specializing in international litigation.
He is the author of two novels, Utterly Monkey and Glover's Mistake, and two collections of poetry, To A Fault and On Purpose. A new volume of poetry, Go Giants, is forthcoming from Faber in January 2013.
Laird has won many awards for his fiction and poetry, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Rupert and Eithne Strong award, a Somerset Maugham award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He has published poetry and essays in many journals including the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and wrote a column on poetry for two years for the Guardian newspaper.
He has taught at Columbia University, Manchester University and Barnard College.
He is the author of two novels, Utterly Monkey and Glover's Mistake, and two collections of poetry, To A Fault and On Purpose. A new volume of poetry, Go Giants, is forthcoming from Faber in January 2013.
Laird has won many awards for his fiction and poetry, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Rupert and Eithne Strong award, a Somerset Maugham award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He has published poetry and essays in many journals including the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and wrote a column on poetry for two years for the Guardian newspaper.
He has taught at Columbia University, Manchester University and Barnard College.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
May 19, 2021
Nick Laird is from Tyrone, Northern Ireland, which is useful to know as many of his poems are influenced by his home territory and upbringing during The Troubles. Born in 1975, Laird left home to attend Cambridge University. There he met his future wife, Zadie Smith, and the couple has lived in London, Italy, and New York (currently). Laird often says he is known as "an Irish poet,and an English novelist".
Members of my Irish poetry book group, for the most part, found these poems challenging. Others though said that his domestic poems were accessible and deeply moving. The volume has three parts,and in each section, there is a poem named "The Good Son". The key to understanding the second poem with this name is the town Newtownhamilton mentioned in part i of the poem. This small town in County Tyrone experienced numerous fatalities and significant damage during the Troubles. People from Northern Ireland will often immediately know what the reference represents as The Troubles continue to live in the memories of the people.
There are poems about his father, the death of his mother, and his children. 'The Vehicle and the Tenor' about his mother's death is a longer poem which allows Laird to tie his homecoming to the territory he travels through to reach his mother's bedside in Armagh. It includes mention of the Ring of Gullion, an ancient geological formation, and he refers to the Great Road of the Fews, an ancient road from Dundalk to Armagh. This territory is the home of his family, and it is also the land of ancient chronicles. My favorite domestic poem was 'Parenthesis', about his children. Writing as a pantoum, a poem of repeating lines, the title, the form and the subject work together brilliantly. One of our group, an astute consumer of Irish poetry, commented that Nick Laird has moved near the top of her list of favorites.
These poems are often quiet and sneak up on you. A close reading of them yields insights to their meaning and a deeper appreciation of this poet.
Shortlisted for the 2018 T .S. Elliott Prize.
Members of my Irish poetry book group, for the most part, found these poems challenging. Others though said that his domestic poems were accessible and deeply moving. The volume has three parts,and in each section, there is a poem named "The Good Son". The key to understanding the second poem with this name is the town Newtownhamilton mentioned in part i of the poem. This small town in County Tyrone experienced numerous fatalities and significant damage during the Troubles. People from Northern Ireland will often immediately know what the reference represents as The Troubles continue to live in the memories of the people.
There are poems about his father, the death of his mother, and his children. 'The Vehicle and the Tenor' about his mother's death is a longer poem which allows Laird to tie his homecoming to the territory he travels through to reach his mother's bedside in Armagh. It includes mention of the Ring of Gullion, an ancient geological formation, and he refers to the Great Road of the Fews, an ancient road from Dundalk to Armagh. This territory is the home of his family, and it is also the land of ancient chronicles. My favorite domestic poem was 'Parenthesis', about his children. Writing as a pantoum, a poem of repeating lines, the title, the form and the subject work together brilliantly. One of our group, an astute consumer of Irish poetry, commented that Nick Laird has moved near the top of her list of favorites.
These poems are often quiet and sneak up on you. A close reading of them yields insights to their meaning and a deeper appreciation of this poet.
Shortlisted for the 2018 T .S. Elliott Prize.
April 27, 2025
American edition is just out from Norton. I reviewed it here:
There’s a lot to be learned about Nick Laird and his poetry just from stopping with his title for a minute or two. First, there is the simple, colloquial casualness of the words. We all know them, even if we realize we know them because they sound so good. There’s that simple alliteration, the almost rhymes of those long “ee”s, the similar length and shape of the words.
And then there are all the things they could mean: “Feel free” as in “Make yourself at home.” “Feel free!” in the imperative, a demand that you recognize something about the condition you live in. “Feel free?” in a skeptical way, questioning the possibility of freedom in a culture shaped by imposed messages and a system of values shaped by commodities.
Then there’s also the simple fact that this book was released in England about the same time as Laird’s wife Zadie Smith’s most recent book of essays. It’s title, of course, was Feel Free. Their comfort with this duplication says something about their relationship, and that too becomes part of this book of poems.
These various attitudes toward the possibilities of language play out in interesting, often powerful ways throughout the poems. “Grenfell” is an elegy for the 72 people killed in the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire in London. Laird is angry, but his poem uses neither the expected language of anger, nor the clichés of grief. The grief and anger of the poet are both suggested by the use of language that could have been generated by a computer, the kind of language we all run across in on-line surveys.
“How satisfied are you with customer support?
Please evaluate the final minutes for how one
might account for it. Any additional comments
should be left in the space at the foot of this page”
The outrage is partially contained in the reader’s reaction to the neutrality of the language.
Likewise, near the end of the book, the poem “Extra Life” recounts the horror of the recent immigration crises in both Europe and the U.S., but it is all told as if it were directions to a new computer game. The poet doesn’t need to belabor the irony of this:
“Click here if you get robbed.
Click here if you get raped.
Click here if you get caught.
Click here if you’re sent back
or held for an indefinite term
in a ‘processing facility’.
Press esc. And wait. White
Light. Your character appears.
Click here to hop the fence
and merge with the foot passengers.”
There are other, very different poems in this collection, poems that refer directly to Laird’s family, both his parents and his children. Here he doesn’t use the kind of language and irony that he plays with in his poems of cultural or historical anger. In these poems the language is saved from sentimentality by its unadorned directness.
In “Silk Cut” the poet remembers walking in Dublin with his father when he was a child and, when he tried to take his hand, he was burned by his father’s cigarette. Now, as the father and son walk out to a pub after the death of a family member, the poet writes, “I have to stop my hand from taking his.” It is fairly certain that “Silk Cut” will start appearing in anthologies of current Irish, British, or even American poetry in the near future.
Nick Laird is from Northern Ireland, was educated in England, and now teaches in the U.S. He is one of that post-Seamus Heaney generation of writers who use the language and landscape of Northern Ireland but who look to a much larger international audience. They are a group of poets distinguished by the seriousness with which they practice their art, a seriousness that allows—as Nick Laird shows us in Feel Free—a range of emotions that can include even laughter.
Poet and writer Keith Taylor's most recent book is The Bird-while, a 2017 finalist for a Foreword Indie Book Award for Poetry. He taught creative writing at the University of Michigan and has received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. His reviews have appeared in the Ann Arbor Observer, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
There’s a lot to be learned about Nick Laird and his poetry just from stopping with his title for a minute or two. First, there is the simple, colloquial casualness of the words. We all know them, even if we realize we know them because they sound so good. There’s that simple alliteration, the almost rhymes of those long “ee”s, the similar length and shape of the words.
And then there are all the things they could mean: “Feel free” as in “Make yourself at home.” “Feel free!” in the imperative, a demand that you recognize something about the condition you live in. “Feel free?” in a skeptical way, questioning the possibility of freedom in a culture shaped by imposed messages and a system of values shaped by commodities.
Then there’s also the simple fact that this book was released in England about the same time as Laird’s wife Zadie Smith’s most recent book of essays. It’s title, of course, was Feel Free. Their comfort with this duplication says something about their relationship, and that too becomes part of this book of poems.
These various attitudes toward the possibilities of language play out in interesting, often powerful ways throughout the poems. “Grenfell” is an elegy for the 72 people killed in the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire in London. Laird is angry, but his poem uses neither the expected language of anger, nor the clichés of grief. The grief and anger of the poet are both suggested by the use of language that could have been generated by a computer, the kind of language we all run across in on-line surveys.
“How satisfied are you with customer support?
Please evaluate the final minutes for how one
might account for it. Any additional comments
should be left in the space at the foot of this page”
The outrage is partially contained in the reader’s reaction to the neutrality of the language.
Likewise, near the end of the book, the poem “Extra Life” recounts the horror of the recent immigration crises in both Europe and the U.S., but it is all told as if it were directions to a new computer game. The poet doesn’t need to belabor the irony of this:
“Click here if you get robbed.
Click here if you get raped.
Click here if you get caught.
Click here if you’re sent back
or held for an indefinite term
in a ‘processing facility’.
Press esc. And wait. White
Light. Your character appears.
Click here to hop the fence
and merge with the foot passengers.”
There are other, very different poems in this collection, poems that refer directly to Laird’s family, both his parents and his children. Here he doesn’t use the kind of language and irony that he plays with in his poems of cultural or historical anger. In these poems the language is saved from sentimentality by its unadorned directness.
In “Silk Cut” the poet remembers walking in Dublin with his father when he was a child and, when he tried to take his hand, he was burned by his father’s cigarette. Now, as the father and son walk out to a pub after the death of a family member, the poet writes, “I have to stop my hand from taking his.” It is fairly certain that “Silk Cut” will start appearing in anthologies of current Irish, British, or even American poetry in the near future.
Nick Laird is from Northern Ireland, was educated in England, and now teaches in the U.S. He is one of that post-Seamus Heaney generation of writers who use the language and landscape of Northern Ireland but who look to a much larger international audience. They are a group of poets distinguished by the seriousness with which they practice their art, a seriousness that allows—as Nick Laird shows us in Feel Free—a range of emotions that can include even laughter.
Poet and writer Keith Taylor's most recent book is The Bird-while, a 2017 finalist for a Foreword Indie Book Award for Poetry. He taught creative writing at the University of Michigan and has received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. His reviews have appeared in the Ann Arbor Observer, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
November 29, 2020
There is an uncommon tenderness to Laird's poetry, and Feel Free is no exception.
Part tribute to a lost father, ode to a loved family, and scream against the unkindness of the world, Laird's collection makes me want to write, and to love, in turns and all at once. Look out for "Parenthesis", "The Cartoons", "Incantation", and "Extra Life" as particularly poignant examples of Laird's mastery of his craft.
Part tribute to a lost father, ode to a loved family, and scream against the unkindness of the world, Laird's collection makes me want to write, and to love, in turns and all at once. Look out for "Parenthesis", "The Cartoons", "Incantation", and "Extra Life" as particularly poignant examples of Laird's mastery of his craft.
February 22, 2019
Excellent collection from an accomplished Irish poet, in the footsteps & shadows of the great Seamus Heaney. Laird deals with age-old emotions in a moving way, enlightening & illuminating his own private griefs & pleasures with fine respect for his family roots & branches; birth & death are the milestones of all of our brief lives. A proper book of poems with a timeless quality.
October 14, 2018
An accomplished and varied collection. Didn't totally hit the spot for me but I could see the quality of the writing.
September 4, 2025
Impressive and moving collection. Particularly enjoyed the exploration of the tension between the corporate and the human in the modern world. Some excellent poems on loss and parenting. A poet particularly attuned to absence and the paradox of writing about what’s not there.
January 29, 2025
Nick Laird's newest collection, 'Feel Free', is such a step up from his previous 'Go Giants', and full of inventive, formally challenging poetry that is endlessly personal, political and powerful. From the ruthlessly clever 'Parenthesis' to the three 'The Good Son' poems, Laird's writing is always densely packed with meaning, though never cumbersome. I especially love the opening to 'Team Me': "I get very bored of having to respond / to the circumstances of my own life. / I'm tired of trailing my ego around." This self-awareness is typical of Laird's collection which absolutely will leave you feeling, if not free, then freer.
Read
June 6, 2025I fail to understand how such drivel can be called poetry. I thoroughly did not like this and only carried on because I felt sure it would get better, and when it failed to do so, I was more than halfway through and it would have been churlish not to finish it. It will stand as a reminder to me not to read anything by this writer again!
July 16, 2019
Of course Zadie Smith’s husband writes excellent poetry.
July 30, 2019
I think Laird is one of my favorite living poets. He goes for some conceptual reaches in this that I didn’t love but his intimate poems of grief and quotidian love gorgeous
August 25, 2019
As long as he writes them I'll read them.
September 5, 2019
Damn good poet. He's softened his fury a bit here. I particularly enjoyed 'Incantation'.
September 16, 2019
“incantation” was a favorite but generally struggled to get through this one. there isn’t a clear thematic link to the collection leaving the poems feeling disjointed and haphazard in spots.
April 15, 2020
One of the finest poets writing in the english language today.
October 23, 2020
intimate and political and wry and funny and beautiful and angry and moving all at once.
June 15, 2021
An absolutely thought provoking collection of poems. Im going to read everything by Laird.
July 1, 2021
Brilliant poems. By a voice new to me. Amazing.
Read
October 4, 2022I can see a lot of work went into the poems, but I didn’t get much from them. I don’t read much poetry, I’m happy to assume I just don’t have the knowledge to really appreciate this book.
February 18, 2023
an Irish poet really is something
November 25, 2024
Some really gorgeous moments here.
December 5, 2024
This was my second read, and it left me even more impressed. An exceptional book to recommend to anyone who underestimates modern poetry.
August 22, 2024
Great
Nick is a master of his craft that is, thankfully (I think), no where near his peak. I highly recommend.
Nick is a master of his craft that is, thankfully (I think), no where near his peak. I highly recommend.
December 24, 2025
I never know how to rate poetry collections. As with most: some solid gems, some that don't resonate with me so much. Worth reading; my copy has lots of tags for the ones that resonated - more than most. I'm a Laird fan.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews