Unearthly Toys: Poems and Masks

Winner of the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize.

Ned Denny's Unearthly Toys are treacherous playthings, as rigorously structured as they are thematically unsettling, a 'rhapsody of rags gathered from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled about' (as Robert Burton dubbed his Anatomy of Melancholy).

The collection opens on a twilit, numinous world of exotic drugs, subterranean drums and visionary apprehension in which-to quote Twin Peaks, a rec...