Description

 

Pibroch is a searing poetry collection exploring parallels between the Climate Emergency and the Piper Alpha Disaster of 1988.

Pibroch, from the distance of intervening years, brings the Piper Alpha disaster searingly alive, through poems like You Watch the News, based on reports, eye witness accounts, and the poet’s blistering words. Other disasters such as that of Aberfan are also touched on. There are tender poems as well, one describing clearing out the house of his parents, resurrecting their memory through their grave goods left behind. A scholarly collection, very pertinent to our uncertain times.

Sheena Blackhall

 

This is a searing collection, so well sustained and interconnected that it serves not only as a work of art but as a manual of the human condition: its stupidity, its heroism, its love, its inclination for self destruction. Some piece of work! 

Hugh McMillan

 

Pibroch, in keeping with its title, is a rich and resonant volume of verse, with subtle shifts of tone that change the mood music at the turn of a page. In this varied and variegated collection, John Boland digs deep and gathers a late lyrical harvest of bright, bristling lines that carry the reader from lamentation for a lost piper to the bittersweetness and sticky fingers of a honey thief. Pibroch is in the broadest sense concerned with the ecology of memory and with the risks of a form of memorialisation that leaves open the door to danger and repetition. A recurrent theme is the writing of disaster, a response to tragedy that goes beyond sentiment to call for safety and justice. Characterised by earthiness, earthliness, and an expert ear for the rhythms of reportage, harnessed to expose the inadequacy of official accounts of so-called industrial accidents, these poems catch the crackle and cry in stark unsentimental imagery. They bring to the dryness of documents and depositions a full-hearted understanding of the heads behind the headlines, the names behind the numbers, and those left behind when the heads are counted. The catastrophe of climate change is a key theme, blazoned in the human cost of fossil fuel in all its infernal horror, and reharmonised in a minor key in the guilty pleasures of a family robbing nature in their backyard. Pibroch is about sustainability, and what is worth keeping, preserving, holding onto: the renewable energy of anger and hunger for change. There are some things to which we must never acclimatise and the destruction of the planet and the people who keep it going is one.

 

Willy Maley