In Alvy Carragher’s fourth collection a questioning voice moves between continents and through the fractured landscapes of memory. Poems ask how we continue after a difficult childhood, and how a life might be understood when the past resists any single, coherent narrative. In work that wonders why ‘some days get printed / on the heart’ the poet touches on survival and departure and on how we might go on.

Family is both refuge and source of harm, and father figures cast long shadows over these pages. Generations carry the effects of silence, mental illness and inherited violence, yet the poems remain open to the wider world and to the possibility of kindness. In lines where ‘love [is] like a teaspoon scooping the sun / from a soft-boiled egg’ moments of tenderness become a way of enduring. Energetic, expansive, and empathetic, this courageous book is as disquieting as it is consoling.

Sample Poems

The Only Fear I’ve Ever Had is Standing Still

I took my body out in the dark.

No, I did not think. I took my body out.

The ice rink was a loop of the nearest park —

three reindeer at its centre, lit up golden.

Otherwise the city had its head down.

I wore a pair of skates. Nothing delicate,

boots on knives. The wind was like a knife, too.

Everything sharp and shining. An empty rink,

only the Zamboni polishing the surface.

And times when it had rained, leaves had fallen,

rain again, and then the rink had rehardened —

there would be maple leaves trapped under the ice.

I wish I had understood that this was beautiful.

But the stems caused bumps in the surface

that knocked me off my feet. Ice is unforgiving.

It suited me. I listened to John Prine singing

'Bruised Orange' about his heart in the ice house.

One song on a loop. I needed those words.

Maybe I knew what he meant, maybe I didn’t.

I don’t speak much about that winter. When I do

I say I liked gliding backwards on one foot,

weaving in and out, twisting and turning.

I even learnt to spin. The trick was trusting myself.

I let my body leap and every time I landed I laughed.

It was all I could do to keep from shattering.

Neither of Us Asks the Other’s Name

The bus ploughs towards April,

through the Galway rain,

to a city where all my thoughts

look over their shoulders.

I’m squeezed in beside a man

the same age as my father.

I collect details as he speaks

about driving heavy cargo

in fourteen-hour shifts, music

and mileage. He names a record

he loves by Garth Brooks,

how he learnt to drop the needle

on the song that helps the most.

He shows me a photograph

of his only son, gleaming

beside a silver trophy.

Once, he held this boy up

to gaze out windows.

He returns to this country

to visit his parents' graves

and says that Irish is more

than a language; it’s the thread

tying him to these lands

where he ran in steel-toe boots

across bog. Freezing muck,

hard rain. And we’re laughing

at what strength is and how

this is one way to survive.

I’m close enough to touch

the tattoo on his arm —

an ornate cross. Black, faded.

Ink to honour a friend he buried

the same April as his father.

He tells me you never forget

a month that comes for you

like that, and they do.

April sweeps through him.

He follows grief through bog,

ravaged fields, the low stone walls

between here and there.

When I ask about his wife

he grows older. Two marriages.

One ending in daughters

who haven’t spoken to him

in decades, not since his mother

died many Aprils ago.

It’s all on their side. Three times

he repeats himself, picking up

time's needle and dropping it

on the same place in the record.

Not knowing better words,

I say there’s a poem that says

April is the cruellest month.

He nods as if this doesn’t surprise him.

Maybe I remind him of his girls,

the blue eyes, the voice that points

to this part of the country.

I’ve asked him questions

I may never ask my father.

He has told me stories

he may never tell his daughters.

My Great Grandfather Was One of Dublin’s Doorstep Babies

Did they find his name written on a scrap of paper

or hand him Carragher like an afterthought

arriving hours after he was lifted from the concrete

into a new room? Let there be good wool, warm milk.

Dublin was likely dark but, let’s say, enough has happened

without adding rain. Let him be nestled in a wooden box —

nothing hard like oak, but solid pine, soft like the pine

his son and grandson will one day use to shape their lives.

If his name carried anything from that century to this one

it’s a knack for walking away. Passed down from his mother,

who was probably young, gasping at how much had slipped

from her so early. I wonder if she chose the doorstep

or lay prone on a bed as someone put him in the box?

Let her raise her head. Let her insist on her mother’s quilt.

Let us imagine she does that much, so the boy can pull

at the familiar, fraying threads as he grows into a man

tossing and turning in boarding houses and drinking

in dimly lit rooms. A man who takes the boat to work

in Birmingham. He begins his family there. Abandoning

them as if family were a wound that keeps opening.

If we go back to the night he was found, let’s place

a woman crooning over him. Let’s give her a lilting voice.

Let her sing his name until it sticks: Dear One, Dear One,

Dear One. May he carry this tune for the rest of his life.

Book Details

• Publication date: October 2026

• Paperpack ISBN: 978 1 91737 132 2

• Hardback ISBN: 978 1 91737 133 9