Go Giants: Poems

by Nick Laird

Overview

An inventive new collection by the writer whom Colm Tóibín called “an assured and brilliant voice in Irish poetry.”

Go Giants, Nick Laird’s stunning third volume of poetry, is full of "epic ambition." In a collection that’s "easily his most accomplished to date…[Laird] gives everything of himself in a poetry as expansive and thought-provoking as his considered response to an infinitely complicated universe needs it to be" (The Guardian). Laird boldly engages with topics ranging from fatherhood and marriage to mass destruction and the cosmos. Go Giants is a brash, brave, and wildly imaginative new collection.

From Go Giants:

Go in peace to love and serve the.
Go and get help. Go directly to jail.
Go down in flames. Go up in smoke.
Go for broke. Go tell Aunt Rhody.
Go tell the Spartans. Go to hell.
Go into detail. Go for the throat.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393347449
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/09/2013
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic, and the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. His many honors include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The poem “Up Late” was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Laird taught for ten years in New York City and currently lives in London and Ireland.

Editorial Reviews

"Masterful…a work of scholarship and a labor of love."

New York Post - Michael Goodwin

"A happy marriage of intellect and economy… Laird’s observations in these precision-tooled poems are deft and graceful."

Chicago Tribune - Michael Robbins

"Displays an almost child-like wonder in the variety and slippage of language, alongside an adult sensibility of its boundless possibilities and dangers…Here are some of Laird's most successful and mature poems."

The Times (London)

"One could wear out a thesaurus of superlatives describing his stanzas with their insouciant rhythms and line breaks that appear like a cliff in a cartoon, leaving you momentarily suspended in space with a dizzying view."

Booklist - Michael Autrey

"Streetwise, edgy and downright cool…. History, Greek myths, personal gossip, library carrel graffiti and the general ephemera of contemporary urban existence all find their way into [Flynn’s] elegant assemblages."

The Washington Post - Troly Jollimore