Kate Newman

Grim

ISBN: 9781851321209

A profound realisation of suffering unequalled in Irish poetry. This volume of emotionally courageous poems is destined to find an enduring place in the canon of Holocaust literature. To read these poems is to taste sorrow.

– Cathal Ó Searcaigh

Susan Sontag has delineated the pornography of fascism; these powerful poems chart its lunacy, its aberrant, horrific, distortions of reason.

– Paula Meehan

Kate Newmann’s approach goes deep into the immediate record and finds a poem there. She does it horribly well.

– John Kerrigan, Professor of English 2000, University of Cambridge

Refusing false consolations, this book grapples with the dreadful knowledge of the real. Instead of trying to awaken from the nightmare of history, Kate Newmann composes a haunting soundscape that bears necessary witness.

– Theodore Deppe, Director of Stonecoast Programme in Ireland, University of Maine

Before reading English at King’s College, Cambridge, Kate Newmann worked at the Museum of Cretan Ethnology. After graduating, she taught English as a foreign language in Oxford and Rhodes, and was appointed Junior Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast, where she compiled and published the Dictionary of Ulster Biography (1993). Her third collection of poetry, I Am a Horse was published in 2011 by Arlen House and three of the poems were recorded on a CD, How Well Did You Love? She has won the Listowel Poetry Prize and the Roundyhouse Poetry Prize, among others, and has been shortlisted for the UK’s National Poetry Competition.