Safe House

The follow-up to his hugely popular debut, The King of Suburbia, Iggy McGovern's second collection of poems sees him walk the metrical line between a childhood in the religiously divided northern town of Coleraine and his present home in Dublin, en route taking in the wonders and absurdities of contemporary life in our "one island, two countries" and, increasingly, taking inspiration from his second life in science.

Here are poems in which the northern Troubles begin to raise their head, in which the orb of the Child of Prague might be mistaken for a hand-grenade. And here too are poems from the other end of that conflict, from an Ireland struggling to come to terms with the near collapse of its economy and an apparent inability to prioritise between, as one poem would have it, "a whirlpool, a milking stool, a drug mule".

Iggy McGovern was born in Coleraine and resides in Dublin, where he is Associate Professor of Physics at Trinity College. His poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals in Ireland and abroad, as well as in the popular "Poetry In Motion" series on trains in the Dublin suburban rail system (DART). Awards include the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. A first collection, The King of Suburbia, published by Dedalus Press, was the winner of the inaugural Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry in 2006.