This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here. Byrne's poetry sparkles with wit and irony, and Blood / Sugar is his long-awaited first collection. The editor of a highly-regarded poetry magazine, Byrne maintains great technical proficiency in his structuring of verse, moving effortlessly between the traditional and the innovative to shape poems that brim with lyricism and confidence. 'James Byrneís second collection, Blood / Sugar is packed, ambitious and absorbing... The comparison that comes to mind is with Christopher Middleton, with whom Byrne shares a restless hunger.' Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review 'His poetry is clean, clear and contemporary; it cuts to the bone of the beast every time.' Keith Richmond, Tribune 'In Blood Sugar James Byrne's fine poems explore a variety of themes, combining light and shadow, tenderness and wit.' Wayfarers 'The way the Peruvian avant-gardist poet Cesar Vallejo described language as being the ëdark nebulae of life that dwells on the turn of a sentence...í can be applied here to the irrefutable poetics of James Byrne. For he has constructed a collection of poems of considerable imaginative pressure, a vice-like poetical ethos... poems of such exactitude and accuracy that it is almost as if Byrne is attempting to replicate and reconstruct his own jaw at the potterís wheel of his imagining... According to Geoffrey Hill, 'difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings', and this can most definitely be said of the requirements of the reader facing these innovative poems.' Paul Stubbs James Byrne was born in 1977 and is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published in 2003. In 2008 he won the prestigious Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. Since 2006 James has taught Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications.
James Byrne was born in 1977 near London. He has published seven full collections of poetry, including The Overmind (Broken Sleep Books, 2024), Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022), Of Breaking Glass (Broken Sleep Books , 2022) and The Caprices, a response to Francisco Goya's 'Los Caprichos' (Arc, 2019). Nightsongs for Gaia includes works previously unpublished in the UK, such as Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015) and limited edition pamphlets,, Mythaca (2023) and Emanations (2024). As well as being a poet, Byrne is an experienced editor and translator. He edited The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017 and, in 2012, he co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012). He has co-edited a number of anthologies, including I Am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English, Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Arc / Edge Hill University Press, 2017) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Byrne co-translated Libyan poet Ashur Etwebi (Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution, Arc 2022), a poem of which was selected for the Deep Vellum anthology Best Literary Translations in 2024. I Am a Rohingya was part of the supplementary evidence presented to Aung San Su Kyi when she was invited to the Hague to answer crimes of genocide against the Rohingya people. Recently, for Arc, he co-translated with Rohingya author Ro Mehrooz, Poems Written Through Barbed-Wire Fences. At present, he is working on a collection of essays, and finalising a new collection of poems. |
