Randomer

by Colm Keegan

A poetic tour de force. The reality of life stripped back to its bare fundamentals. Despite charting a life lived through austerity and the predations of political elites, Colm Keegan's optimism - for his children, his family, and his community - never flags. Even on the most difficult terrain he is a sure-footed and trustworthy guide. While still honoring his roots in the Dublin vernacular, Keegan increases his range, more sophisticated and diverse in style, more mature in tone. In the rubble and the detritus, in the waste and the ruin, Keegan finds nuggets of subtle and pervasive truth. Keegan is a writer and poet from Dublin. Since 2005, he has been shortlisted four times for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, for both poetry and fiction.

Genres: Poetry

73 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2018

Reviews

[Maltheus Broman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Randomer (2018) is in many regards similar to Don’t Go There (2012). The lyrical ego and the author have been maturing in the meanwhile, and, in the best sense, Keegan cultivated his poetry through another stage of life.

Poems like Distraction, Rain, or Pawned and many others echo long after finishing this collection.

[Colette Colfer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vibrant and visceral poetry that is connected to the rush of the urban underbelly as well as to the subtler flows of nature. My kind of poetry. Raw and real and rhythmical.

[Patrick Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This, Colm Keegan's second collection of poetry, is an absorbing mixture of the domestic and the political, the angry and the celebratory, the sad and the sensual. Like his first collection, "Don't Go There", its sections progress through a sequence of poetic memoirs, insights and epiphanies that are in turn colloquial and formal as their author further establishes his growing mastery of each required tone and form. Essential reading for those who know contemporary Dublin ( and, indeed contemporary Ireland) -- or for those for those who may think they know it.