Up Late
Poems
Published on 12. August 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-1-324-11042-2 (ISBN)
Description
Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity, and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. These poems transport us from a clifftop in Ireland's County Cork to a bench in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a London garden.
At the book's heart lies the Forward Prize-winning title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The reverberations of this knockout poem echo through the volume in its interrogations of inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retained. Amid rage, grief, and the conflagration of reality, Laird finds tenderness in the moments of connection that grow between the cracks and offers glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, where everything is still at stake and infinite.
Astonishing in its emotional range and intellect, Up Late is a powerful volume from an "exceptionally gifted poet" (Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement).
At the book's heart lies the Forward Prize-winning title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The reverberations of this knockout poem echo through the volume in its interrogations of inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retained. Amid rage, grief, and the conflagration of reality, Laird finds tenderness in the moments of connection that grow between the cracks and offers glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, where everything is still at stake and infinite.
Astonishing in its emotional range and intellect, Up Late is a powerful volume from an "exceptionally gifted poet" (Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement).
Reviews / Votes
"One of the finest elegies in my recent memory." -- Craig Morgan Teicher - NPR "Ruminative and daring.... [Nick Laird is] a wild poet-soul attentive to everything in poetic omniscience, challenging readers to see what he sees in the double witnessing of art's power.... This is mastery over formal limitation-a kaleidoscope of perfectly calibrated chains of attention, constraints that break, release and re-form." -- Carol Muske-Dukes - Washington Post "Readers will delight in poems that model how to attend to-and extend-'the custody of the self.'" -- Publishers Weekly "Surely one of the major elegies of this century." -- David Starkey - Santa Barbara Independent "Destined to become a classic of 'life event' poetry: it will join the ranks of Auden's 'Stop all the clocks' et al." -- Stephanie Sy-Quia - Poetry Review "Up Late, passionate and angry as Hamlet, is formally brilliant, an exercise in control." -- Martina Evans - Irish Times "Up Late is an incredible book. It finds a music for our moment-its fragilities and terrors, it sets restlessness to a rhythm. It finds a new kind of irony, one that confronts our endless gallop into a mechanical, artificial, made-up idea of future, and asks instead why are we here in the first place, asks so without patronizing, almost without irony itself. There is an honesty in the tone of this book that stays in mind days after the last page is turned." -- Ilya Kaminsky - Literary Hub "With Up Late, Nick Laird has stepped into his own future and produced a daring new poetic idiom that is all his own." -- Billy Collins, author of Musical TablesMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 208 mm
Width: 147 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
95 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-324-11042-2 (9781324110422)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic, and the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast. His many honors include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The poem "Up Late" was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Laird taught for ten years in New York City and currently lives in London and Ireland.