Love's Bonfire

Tom Paulin's first collection since The Road to Inver in 2004, Love's Bonfire sets poems about early life and marriage beside up-to-the minute and minutely registered perceptions of post-settlement Ireland. At the book's centre are delicately inward versions of the contemporary Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar, which resonate with the proximity of other lives, other exiles and destinies, as of an autobiography by other means.

Tom Paulin was born in Leeds in 1949 but grew up in Belfast, and was educated at the universities of Hull and Oxford. He has published nine collections of poetry as well as a Selected Poems 1972-1990, two major anthologies, two versions of Greek drama, and several critical works, including The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style and, most recently, Crusoe's Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent. His most recent collection of poems is Love's Bonfire (2012). Well known for his appearances on the BBC's Newsnight Review, he is also the G. M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford.