Blood / Sugar

Includes poems which inhabit and interpret the paradoxes of experience and imagination with insight, wit and metaphoric agility.

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 StubbsJames 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.

Recovery, Apprentice Work, Air Terminals, Days of 1973, Sestina for R, A Private Garden, Widowed / Unwidowed, Two Phonecalls at 4 am, From the Sky Parlour, Dowry for an Aerophobic, Speed Date, Serapis from a Postcard, The Buddhas of Bamiyan, A King's Faith, Chess in Kirkuk, Nightnurse, Sanchez de Aldama, 14th April 1930, (Reverb) At the Scene of 'The Earthenware Head', Prospecting Several Instances of Active Imagination, Four Interpretations of Photographs by Claude Cahun, Five Interpretations of Overpainted Photographs by Gerhard Richter, Avoiding a Close Reading of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, Three Presumptions Whilst in the Neighbourhood of a Friend, Voice Portraits of Uncle Patrick at the Reunion House, Not the Arm Wrestle, The Angel vs. Gabriel, Inclub Satires, Doctor One-Eye, Inviting the Ghosts, Thieves' Society, To-tock-a-noo-lah, On Not Reaching a Summit, A Room in the House of Aries, Dragon Tree, Incest, Jackanoria, Entry (Cornwall 1991), A Local Marriage, The Ashes, The Minister's Daughter, What Remains of Old Addresses, Testimony. Notes, Biographical Note.