Adam Crothers

This, the fifth and final volume in the Trinity Tales series, completes a cycle that began with tales from the 1960s. It invites readers to step into the world of Trinity College as it was in the first decade of this century through the reflections of students who attended the university during those years. Within its pages lie the stories of twenty-eight graduates from a mix of diverse backgrounds whose experiences may dispel the myths of what it means to be a ‘Trinity student’. The collection reveals the rapidly changing world of the early 2000s. This was a time of the internet revolution, when social media first affected student life, when mobile phones and laptops became ubiquitous, when handwritten work was passing into history, when The Buttery closed its doors – and all this coming against the backdrop of an overheating then imploding Irish economy. This kaleidoscope of recollections captures a student body in transformation and features stories of personal discovery and achievement against the odds. For some it proved a life-changing era when sexual, racial or class barriers were confronted. This volume concludes a remarkable half-century journey, portraying the lives of others, and of ourselves.

Home to My Cats by Adam Crothers is a fizzing, formally playful pamphlet that turns feline devotion into a poetics of art, music and mischief. These poems move between lyric address and ekphrasis, riffing on Louise Bourgeois, Franz Marc, Takashi Murakami, Louis Wain, and Arthur Rackham, while also letting Taylor Swift and Leonard Cohen wander into the cat's-eye frame. Crothers writes with a quick, punning intelligence and a gift for the compressed song, where philosophy slides into litter-tray comedy, and tenderness is sharpened by wit. Beneath the surface-level glee sits a serious enquiry into attention, companionship and belief, as the cats become both muse and measure, their small tyrannies and private theologies remaking the home into a site of lyric necessity.

This second collection by Northern Irish poet Adam Crothers, whose first book won the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, includes sonnets and prose poems, anxiety and swagger, confession and nonsense.

Winner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award 2017. Several Deer is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock 'n' roll. But he does so with rhythmic subtlety and verbal craftsmanship, with unmistakable technical acuity. The poems are acrobatic: homophones, mondegreens, malapropisms, paraprosdokians, antanaclasis, polyptoton and puns are juggled with dexterity. Yet, for all their craft, the poems remain empathic, sincere, abscised from the particular experience rather than plucked from the common branch, addressing real people, albeit with the cynic's ironizing compulsion. 'Now send in the clowns', ends the collection's opening poem - and so they follow: happy and sad, wise and tragic, a touch melodramatic, wilfully misunderstood. They console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture new and old, high and low. Above all, perhaps, it is the air of excited verbal mischief that endears the ear to Several Deer. Easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, the collection doesn't take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits.