Pirate Music

Second collection by a highly talented young poet from Northern Ireland whose debut, The Squirrels Are Dead, won a Somerset Maugham Award.

Miriam Gamble's second collection takes its title from unlicensed broadcasting. Here, the marginalia of prophecy coexist with and counter voices of authority, voices that are at once eerie and depressingly recognisable. An artist steals back paintings, leaving the money in their wake, and scores a cameo on Crimewatch; a figure from medieval memento mori art finds himself up against a consumer deaf to the language of symbolism; animal anti-heroes spit in the face of well-meaning, or not so well-meaning, human interest. Throughout, biological impulses are sparked then thwarted by entropic systems - creatures and humans alike find themselves steered rather than steering, engulfed by repeating patterns which nullify the efforts of the individual life. Pirate Music questions the narratives, including those forged by art itself, by which we shape the world to suit our own devices and steel ourselves against 'what we cannot name or see'.