Gub

Demons, geese, The Laughing Cow, marching bands, LSD and pistols smuggled home from the USSR all turn up in Scott McKendry's debut poetry collection, Gub.

The poems are rooted in the language of working-class Belfast and move between eras and time zones. They close the gap between the real and the fantastical, the academic and the everyday, the parish and the polis. The collection comes to terms with generational trauma, social decay and the rituals of a place with a fraught history and an uncertain future. It calls up the balaclava-wearing gunmen, urban warlords and explosions that marked the decades on either side of the Good Friday Agreement, and it brings the language of ghettoised Belfast into serious Irish poetry.

McKendry carries the lyrical influences of his "ugly city," among them Carson, McGuckian and Longley, lightly. His tightly built structures weave a verse of mourning, witness, alter ego, class alienation and aesthetic turmoil. The tone is noisy, dark and witty, a new voice from Belfast that also speaks to inner-city neighborhoods elsewhere.