Nine Bright Shiners

Irish poet Theo Dorgan's new collection of poems takes its title from a sequence of elegies, Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners. Yet though the book is unflinching as it faces the deaths of friends and loved ones and, indeed, the poet's own mortality, it is unstinting in its celebration of life and love, art and travel, seeing in voyages to other lands - and languages - the new perspectives that help us make sense of who are.