Released 31st July, 2024 // 108 pages // 978-1-916938-32-8 // RRP: £12.99
All the Pretty Lights is a revelation, a book of poems which speaks to many worlds while finding a common ground for all. Here Gerry McGrath's poems manage to balance, often on a knife-edge, between the typical and the weird, the domestic and the otherworldly, the ordinary and the metaphysical. All the Pretty Lights does what the best poetry is supposed to do: it enlarges the reader's universe, and helps us find answers to the eternal mysteries of being human. This is a book with a poetic voice that sings, even at its most discordant.
PRAISE for All the Pretty Lights:
The secret wish of all lyric poetry is to stop time, Charles Simic tells us, and Gerry McGrath understands this viscerally. He brings those blessed tools - craft, image and line break - to build rafts on which to sail the river Lethe. These poems speak to our senses, probe deeper; they make a lasting impression.
— Ilya Kaminsky
Gerry McGrath is a master of a kind of unsettling lyricism that compels attention. When he beams the reader up from a stanza you never really know where you are going to rematerialise. Spare, mellow, brittle, vivid by turns, this is a poetry whose statements and conjurings respect the surrounding silence.
— David Kinloch
McGrath's book takes a completely different direction from pretty much the range of current Anglophone poetry, refreshingly so. Steeped in – and unafraid of – continental European culture, the poems here create dreamscapes and dream logic, claiming and re-activating a hitherto underused Surrealist inheritance. They play tricks with and on the reader, dance delightful speech-steps which are in turn dainty (those meditative stanzas of pivoting short lines and their pauses) and complex (those macro-structures which bring the almost-random into the ordering sense of an anarchic catalogue). Though the poems appear at first delicate, at times tender certainly, there is a boldness here. As one poem tells us: 'Poetry is a summons / to courage'. Before such an invitation, we can only dive in and swim within these remarkable texts, invigorated.
— Richard Price
ABOUT Gerry McGrath:
Gerry McGrath has published two critically-acclaimed collections, A to B in 2008, and Rooster, which was shortlisted for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year in 2013. He received a Scottish Arts Council New Writers’ Bursary in 2007 and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship Award in 2004. His pamphlet Love All The People (2021) confirmed his place as “one of the most acute and moving observers of our lives”. His poems “alter the reader and benefit our humanity”.
