RIP003: Calling Card #1: Peter Adair
The debut pamphlet from Peter Adair, the first in our Calling Cards series, releasing work from poets who have yet to publish a collection.
Purchase on Amazon Kindle and Etsy Publication Date: 7th October 2021 Listen to four poems from the pamphlet Peter Adair was born in Belfast. He studied at the University of Ulster. His poems have appeared in PN Review, The Honest Ulsterman and other journals. He has a poem in Eyewear’s anthology The Best British and Irish Poets 2019-2020. He was a Lagan Online 12-Now New Original Writer. In 2018 he won the Funeral Services Northern Ireland Poetry Competition. He has been shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. Adair was a member of Queen’s University Writers’ Group, hosted by Ciaran Carson. He has read at the Belfast Book Festival and Bangor Aspects Festival. He lives in Bangor, County Down.
"Like the late-night radio show of ‘Henry’s Rhyming Moments’, Peter Adair’s poems are words thrown out into the dark, unsure who might be tuning in. The city is a space of carceral narratives, where lungs blotch ‘like a field of rotten flax’, and only an unmasked summer sky floats free. Tense and brooding yet intimate and tender, these poems lead us sensitively through the labyrinth towards whatever lies beyond." – David Wheatley "This debut pamphlet provides a welcome introductory window into the range and resonance of Peter Adair’s poetry. Intelligent and emotionally honest, these poems speak to the heart and draw the reader into the moment, whether that is the fragmentary lived experience of the pandemic, an encounter outside a bar, or the life of a Belfast mill girl at the beginning of the 20thcentury. Adair shows a true understanding of how poetry can connect us to ourselves and to an understanding of the past. These poems – 'sound a soft blaze of light, a hard harmony'." – Moyra Donaldson |