More Sky

Joe Carrick-Varty

From Shelf: T.S Eliot Poetry Prize shortlist 2023

Debut collection from a British-born Irish writer who was a star of Carcanet's New Poetries VIII anthology.

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. A The Irish Times Book of the Year. More Sky is a remarkable and remarkably various debut collection from Eric Gregory Award winner, Joe Carrick-Varty, tracking the ways in which experience of addiction and domestic violence shape a life. Carrick-Varty approaches difficult material with great skill and poise: here we find stunning individual lyrics, with an eye for the vivid and surreal; surprising sequences which use Buddhism and Greek myth and the life of coral to refract the poems' interests; and the astonishing sixty-three page long poem 'sky doc' which meditates on suicide, and its retrospective haunting of every corner of its speaker's life.