Books
Pit Lullabies
‘Here an acerbic wit is fused with ruminations on the female body along with the concerns of early parenthood... Traynor’s sound is effortlessly hypnotic, her language formed, deliberate and lyrical.’ – Anthony Anaxagorou,
Poetry Book Society Selector
‘Wild and exhilarating’ - Martina Evans, The Irish Times
Pit Lullabies celebrates the amazement and joy of parenthood, while also exploring difficult experiences of anxiety and post-natal depression. Violence against women, environmental concerns and the uncertainties of 21st-century living are also explored here in poems by turns visceral, lyrical, angry and funny. Running through the collection is a series of Pit Lullabies, a fractured sequence of attempted lullabies that moves from the darker days of new motherhood and into the light.
This third collection from Jessica Traynor follows two acclaimed collections from Dedalus Press. Pit Lullabies is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2022 in the UK.
‘Written with a lightness of touch, these poems are capable of dealing with the big themes – especially those of birth, death or illness…this poet [is] capable of creating canonical work which draws on a contemporary re-thinking of poetic traditions while finding a voice that is wholly her own.’
- Siobhan Campbell on The Quick, Poetry Ireland Review
Buy now from Dedalus Press
‘The quality of Liffey Swim guarantees that Traynor is a poet to keep reading and listening to. Her language is fresh, erudite and engaging. Her writing future is sure to be a bright one.’
- Libby Harte, Cordite Review
Buy now from Dedalus Press
‘This is an excellent book and disturbing as it needs to be. You should add it to your Christmas list.’
- Carol Ballantine, The Irish Times
All proceeds go to MASI. Buy ebook here
The Quick
The Quick is the second collection of poems by Jessica Traynor.
Echoes and hauntings, visions and visitations, glimpses of other worlds in the margins of this … the second collection of poems by Jessica Traynor begins with a brush with death and goes on to explore a startling variety of connections with life and the matter of living. Throughout, from the loss of loved ones to the arrival of a firstborn “no bigger / than a loaf of bread”, the poems stay faithful to a busy cast of characters which includes strangers encountered on a moonlit quay, the infamous propagandist Lord Haw-Haw, and the restless spirits of recent family, national and international history.
“Visionary, luminous and haunted, Jessica Traynor’s poems are home to a host of compelling characters: witches, changelings, the spirit of Hildegard of Bingen. In ‘The Quick’, even the grotesque is rendered with subtle delicacy – a woman whose ‘lungs fold like an origami bird’. These poems will give you goose-bumps.”
— Helen Mort
“These are poems of such formal ease and control that it is hard to believe this is only Jessica Traynor’s second collection. Her marriage of form and material is accomplished, intelligent and right.”
— Mary O’Malley
Liffey Swim
Buy now from Dedalus Press
Liffey Swim is the debut collection of poems from Dubliner Jessica Traynor, in which family portraits and local history combine with mythological musings to create a strikingly assured and engaging suite of poems. Delivered in a language that is at once fresh and confident, these poems have already earned her a number of awards and honours and marked her out as a distinctive new talent in Irish writing.
“Her finely lyrical work is informed by wide travel, a meditative intelligence and an acute sense of history, in which Dublin and its three rivers become a living metaphor for the truths and felicities of one woman’s life.” — Harry Clifton
Correspondences: an anthology to call for an end to direct provision
edited by Stephen Rea and Jessica Traynor
Buy now from MASI
Correspondences is an anthology that pairs writers, photographers and visual artists in the direct provision system in Ireland with Irish artists and writers. The stories, poems, images and essays you’ll find here reflect the desperation that leads to migration, the hope carried through war and devastation, and the meaningful parallels between the Irish experience of famine and emigration and the experience of asylum seekers in Ireland today. These are stories of frustration, anger, fear, but also of love; the deep love that leads parents, siblings, and partners to seek ‘another Ithaca’ in Ireland.
All proceeds of the book go to MASI.