Tried and Sentenced: Selected Poems - Philip Casey

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Résumé :
A series of meditations on love and pain, Tried and Sentenced draws on acclaimed collections from Raven Press and New Island Books.

On The Year of the Knife

Things that please me in poetry are precision, compassion and images that surpass the common run of language; also that the poet must have an ear for language as a musician has an ear for music. The work of Philip Casey, especially The Year of the Knife, possesses all of these in abundance. - Michael Hartnett

The splendour of Philip Casey's work is that it is rigorous and hard; and somehow also at the same time bright and kind. It's this unique mixture that sets him apart. - Sebastian Barry

Casey writes in a language which is supple, accurate, sensitive and immensely strong.- Roz Cowman

Casey gives physicality to abstract ideas with great assurance and he has an eye for things which do not clamour for attention. There are fine new love poems, and older ones which have benefited from fresh work.- Susan McKay

In whatever mood, the writer's gaze is clear-eyed, observant, unflinching in the face of pain and the awareness of mortality. - Hugh McFadden

Before he was known to readers as a world class fictionist, Philip Casey gave us poems. On the evidence of Dialogue in Fading Light, he remains always and ever a poet of great powers. The wonder and longing, gratitude and grace that inform this work make us grateful for Casey's many gifts. -Thomas Lynch

If readers need a reminder of what language can do, how it can be rescued from the spin-doctors and made new and enthralling, they need look no further than this superb collection. - Joseph O'Connor

Biographie:
I was born in London in 1950 to Irish parents from Co Laois and Co Sligo. The north London of the 1950s was an enchanting, if in retrospect dangerous, playground for children, and I frequently escaped the confines of the family house to play in the bomb-sites in Highgate.

This experience was the germ of my novel The Water Star.
In 1956 the family settled in Ireland near Wexford town, but moved a few years later to Hollyfort in north Wexford. This picturesque landscape, featuring Croghan mountain and Annagh Hill, and the Bann River, features in the three novels which make up The Bann River Trilogy.
Apart from three years in Barcelona in the mid-seventies, I've lived in Dublin since 1971, where I have been a full time poet and novelist since 1979. My next work, due in 2018, will be non-fiction, provisionally entitled 'Histories of The Irish.'