Map of the Last

Irish poet Enda Coyle-Greene's second collection of poems begins with a question about what, apart from laughing, we should be doing 'on this exquisite earth', and ends with the supposition that it is sometimes more than enough to be 'back in your life, life going on.' In between are all the journeys - real and imagined - at least attempted on a daily basis.

A sense of a world in motion pervades the poems whose protagonists are rarely still. Wanderers, drifters, nightwalkers and aimless drivers resign themselves to regret, remorse or simple misunderstandings. The past to which many of them are drawn remains a place where 'everything's done differently.'

The collection's central sequence, 'Salvage' explore the aftermath of a notorious maritime disaster off north Dublin, the poet drawing on newspaper archives and a variety of poetic forms in order to recreate the range and scale of the human tragedy.