Delicious

Padraig Regan

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Padraig Regan’s debut pamphlet, Delicious, has earned its title; this is a mouth-watering and opulent series of uniform prose poems. Each piece has at its heart a distinctive vulnerability as evocative as the collection’s sensory exploration of food, art, and intimacy.  

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There is tension between the poems’ formal and dramatic artfulness, their luxuriant vocabularies and exquisite syntactical angles, and their homeliness, their close-focus/high-stakes tableaux. -Dave Coates, davepoems

 

The thing I admire most in Padraig Regan’s writing is its lightness of touch. The poems may be ambitious in their references to art history or their use of vocabulary – lanugo, escritoire – and in the way their sentences unfurl in unexpected directions, but their beauty comes from the simplicity with which these ingredients come together. I don’t think I’ve ever come across such joyful, vibrant work. - Matthew Welton

 

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There’s a lot of stuff in the writing

While the writing may be ambitious and

 

Much of the writing uses things that are difficult to use without the poems overbalancing

 

Uncommon vocabulary – lanugo –

 

While there is something ambitious in the poems’

And for all the xxxx it is a beauty that retains its simplicity.

 

- Matthew Welton

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Padraig Regan was born in Belfast in 1993. They are the author of two poetry pamphlets, Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. They have recently completed a PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast.