THE ARCHITECT'S DREAM OF WINTER
Shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2014
A world of machines, machine management and communication is at the heart of Cork-born Irish poet Billy Ramsell's second collection of poems. From credit card point-of-sale devices to personal music players, from mobile phones to cardiac supports, the world is seen as enabled, criss-crossed and perhaps even bound by digital signals that between them comprise a new life force on the planet, and one we have scarcely begun to comprehend.
"Billy Ramsell is one of the younger poets who has most fruitfully brought into Ireland the best influences of a British generation including Don Paterson, Michael Donaghy and Ian Duhig - formal sophistication allied to natural spoken idiom, an appetite for the minutiae of contemporary life as eclectic as Paul Muldoon, and an unforced, often witty merging of the public with the intimate. In coming years, he should have much to give to an Irish tradition he has already helped to expand."
— Harry Clifton
"Billy Ramsell's latest collection crosses into the digital landscape to recognize our interior selves, to reclaim that which is human within the synapse of machine, the terabyte of memory. Elegiac, mythic, formally inventive, and more, the poems in this volume span from the circuit board to the cosmos and, all the while, remain focused on the human heart"
— Brian Turner
SELECTED PRAISE FOR THE ARCHITECT'S DREAM OF WINTER
"Ramsell's exploration is highly musical, punctuated by modified traditional lyric forms."
— Maya Catherine Popa in Poetry
"the collection offers something new in Irish writing as it takes our wired, online world as its starting point."
— John McAuliffe in The Irish Times
"a poet of light and silences."
— Alex Runchman in The Stinging Fly
"...meticulously stitched together...it is the richness and originality of the language that ultimately carries the poems."
— Tom Lavelle in Skylight 47
"...vigorous humour, independent spirit and narrative brio...non-Irish readers curious about what's going on in the Republic, press 'refresh' now."
— David Wheatley in The Edinburgh Review
"Ramsell is terrifically good at capturing the music and syntax of this new ecosystem."
— Nessa O'Mahony in Trumpet
"This book is essential reading for those ready and willing to risk a clear-eyed engagement with our world as it is, and as it may be in the future. "
— Jessica Traynor in Colony Journal
"The Architect's Dream of Winter quietly asserts Ramsell's position at the very fore of contemporary Irish poetry: a staggering book and a game-changer."
— Cal Doyle in Southword
"Irish poets need not feel that they must only look abroad for models of innovation. Indeed, Ramsell now provides one version of it himself".
— Michael S. Bengal in The Burning Bush
IL SOGNO D’INVERNO DELL’ARCHITETTO
It’s a pleasure that my book The Architect’s Dream of Winter has been just been published in Italian translation, as Il sogno d’inverno dell’architetto.
It’s out from Casa Editrice L’Arcolaio in Forlì, near Bologna. It’s a truly special privilege to be translated in such an extended fashion.
My deepest gratitude is extended to all at L’Arcolaio for their exquisite production values, to Alberto Masala for his erudite introduction and -especially- to Lorenzo Mari for his patient, painstaking translation.
Thanks are also due to Literature Ireland for their generous support.
