Go There

Aidan Rooney’s first books of poems, Day Release and Tightrope, both published in Ireland, established him as one of the important Irish poets of his generation. Go There is his first collection to be published in the United States, and its richly reflexive play and formal inventiveness signal the further journeys, historical passages, and border crossings of the poems within. What distinguishes Rooney from his contemporaries is not just his emigrant status outside the European Community but the ranginess of his movement across boundaries --geographical, personal, communal, artistic, and linguistic. Ireland, France, Switzerland, Nova Scotia, Haiti, and Boston form backdrops for poems in implicit dialogue with voices elsewhere, colonised and coloniser. With concerns quotidian and universal, poems of ekphrasis, fables, elegies and love letters join ruminations on war and religion, love and death, wealth and poverty. Go There has poems for everyone everywhere.