With pinpoint accuracy, virtuosity and humour, Caoilinn Hughes aligns scientific and poetic venturing. In this striking debut collection she focuses on moments of discovery, from the first controlled nuclear reaction to the shape of an avalanche as witnessed from its catchment area. These are epiphanies with consequences.
About the Author
Caoilinn Hughes' first collection, "Gathering Evidence", was published by Carcanet in 2014. Poems from the collection won the 2012 Patrick Kavanagh Award, the 2013 Cuirt New Writing Prize and Trocaire / Poetry Ireland Competition. Born in Galway, Ireland, she completed her BA and Masters degrees at Queen's University of Belfast. She moved to New Zealand in 2007, where she worked for Google, ran a small consultancy, and finally wrote a Ph.D. at Victoria University of Wellington (60% of which was a novel). She recently moved to The Netherlands, where she holds a position as "Distinguished Visiting Writer" at Maastricht University. She is currently writing her second poetry collection and a new novel.
Reviews
Winner of the 2015 Shine/Strong Award
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2015
Finalist for the New Zealand Post Book Awards 2014
"The notion of the poet as alchemist is a familiar one, but Caoilinn Hughes gives it new and enormous energy. I find myself wondering how she knows so much about so many things; and then I notice how far her poems travel beyond their own footprints. On page after page, she offers transformation – turning facts into feeling, experience into knowledge, prose into poetry, science into art" – Bill Manhire
"Hughes brings to the embers of the Irish lyric new breath, new music, new word hoards, reinvigorating that tradition. She spins news from her travels in the wide world and it feels like essential information. This collection is a flaring forth, an auspicious comet, signal of achievement and promise" – Paula Meehan
"Carcanet Press and Belfast women poets are a very happy combination at the moment, and Caoilinn Hughes promises to be as individual a voice as Sinead Morissey. Add to that a caustic wit, as evidenced on Pacific Rim, or a gift for characterisation in Vagabond Monologue – 'I'll tell you what makes poetry flow? Nice big bank notes to be writing poems on'. And so say all of us" – The Belfast Telegraph
