Subscribe by Email

The Architecture of Chance on 'Books of the Year' lists

It's fortifying as well as really pleasing to see that The Architecture of Chance has found its way onto a couple of separate and quite different 'Books of the Year' lists:

In his post 'Top Reads of 2015' on 3:AM Magazine - something of an annual tradition among the magazine's editors - SJ Fowler includes the book in wonderful company, describing it as "the future of a poetry which reflects our world of language without dispensing with the expressionistic skill of interpreting that language".

And on the 14 December edition of RTÉ Radio's flagship arts programme Arena, Dave Lordan named it as one of five 'Favourite Poetry Books of the Year' from Ireland, commenting: "a very refreshing use of material found on the internet, of signage found around the city ... to shape into poems which make us wonder: is it us that speak words, or is it words that speak us?" The relevant section is available to listen back on the Arena website.

Incidentally, here's my own favourite reads of the past year:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Almost Unpoetic": a review of my books

Sabne Raznik, a poet, book reviewer and freelance writer based in Kentucky in the US, has posted a review of my three books on Yahoo! Voices under the heading 'The Work of Christodoulos Makris' . It's a generally positive response to them, particularly to  Muses Walk ("With it, one begins to see that Makris is an important poet, not just for sleepy Ireland, but perhaps for the world," she writes) but not without expressing some reservations along the way. I must note a couple of factual inaccuracies: the project for which Muses Walk was originally conceived and made is an international one, called 'An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street'; and,   much as I wish it were true, there has been no recent trip to Greece .
Read more

DIAL on Dublin Digital Radio

Tune in to Dublin Digital Radio  on Saturday 7 December 2024 at 2pm local time, where I will be performing excepts from my writing project DIAL , with sonic interventions by Joanna Mattrey, Keith Lindsay and Nick Roth, in a 60 minute broadcast presented by Diatribe Records. DIAL is a durational-procedural-aleatory work I composed by live-transcribing 5 minutes of talk radio broadcasting anywhere in the world each and every day across the entire calendar year 2021, and linking these transcripts with short pieces of 'original' writing produced contemporaneously. The radio station accessed each day depended on the previous day's text, and was determined by entering keywords from it as search terms on the TuneIn platform. The full manuscript runs to over 120k words, and it is divided into 12 chapters arranged as uninterrupted blocks of text. Over the past few months I have been working with Diatribe Records in translating DIAL back into sound by speaking the entire te...
Read more

gorse editorial

I was honoured and delighted to receive an invitation from Susan Tomaselli to join gorse  as poetry editor - an invitation I wasted no time in accepting. As I'd written  elsewhere , I consider gorse a unique and refreshing presence in the Irish literary landscape, with an outlook, temperament and set of interests that resonate deeply with mine. Getting the chance to contribute to it in an editorial capacity and to work towards strengthening the considerable impact it has already made in just two issues is a hugely exciting challenge, full of possibilities. It's hard to specify what kind of poetry I'm looking for, because above all I want to publish poetry I didn't know I was looking for. Likely to interest me, though, is writing that plays with boundaries of form, language and genre, that's aware of social, political, technological and cultural developments, that's interrogative and outward-looking, conceptually-rigorous and witty. We are beginning to work ...
Read more