This is Ron Houchin’s fifth poetry book from the West of Ireland’s largest literary publisher. Salmon was founded and is directed by women and takes pride in the extensive list of female poets it has published. It is equally proud not only of introducing Irish poets who have become well-established, but also of the international poets it has published. Houchin has also been published four times by American houses, most recently the Louisiana State University Press, widely considered the most selective of southern poetry publishers. The poems here were first published by fifteen different literary magazines and six anthologies in both Ireland and the U.S., and have appeared in a film, on a broadside, and even been selected by N.A.S.A. to be on a spaceship that orbited Mars. That experience reinforces the way that these poems are not limited solely to worldly topics but reach beyond into the Solar System.
Cliffs of Moher, Ireland: Salmon Poetry, 2017. 83 pages. Trade paperback