THE Irish Post columnist Joe Horgan's sixth book In Praise of Urban Living is his first with Co. Clare publishers Salmon Poetry.
His work focuses on Irish emigration, the experiences of Irishness, and in this book the reality of urban life growing up in Irish families.
His work has been acclaimed by the likes of The Irish Times, Paula Meehan, Brendan Kennelly and RTÉ.
He has, amongst other credits, received the Patrick Kavanagh Award and awards from the Arts Council of Ireland.
The Galway performance poet Sarah Clancy said of the book: “Joe Horgan’s pitch perfect collection reeks of the boat, the clock, the night shift, the stale shirt, the factory gate, the bedsit, the tower block, yesterday’s ale, the hardened palm, the in-between, it’s a full heart, a half heard song, a migrant’s charm, a cracked pavement with weeds coming through it and everything growing where it can. The poems, every one of them, land you in a place of love and loss and resistance. It is a moving and poignant work, a love song to the exile, to the working man, and to dignity, set against the polyphonic backdrop of the city.”
The short story writer William Wall said: “Brecht once said that art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it. Joe Horgan takes a glittering hammer to our perceptions of the city, of our late-capitalist pseudo-civilisation, and to our understanding of what it means to be human. He deftly flips our understanding of the world, class, beauty, poetry, politics, struggle, all neatly upended so that what we think we know is rendered uncertain, scintillating, painful and, at the same time, beautiful.”
