{"product_id":"the-shark-nursery","title":"Shark Nursery","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWinner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2025\u003cbr\u003e\nShortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2025\u003cbr\u003e\nShortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe poems of \u003cem\u003eThe Shark Nursery\u003c\/em\u003e respond to a disturbed world. The experience of lockdown, of lives lived in an online reality, and of the animal world are the interlocking parts of the poems' world. The animal poems draw on the tradition of animals in Irish poetry and myth. From the wolf's touch to the rat's tweet, animals and fish refuse the roles human beings impose on them. O'Malley's animals find new language in the face of contemporary perils.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn fusing mythic with modern elements, \u003cem\u003eThe Shark Nursery\u003c\/em\u003e is marked by rigorous attention to language and tone. Its poems weave between human, animal and metaphysical realms. In a space before noise begins, tigers visit cities and a white leopard sits on a lawn in Suburbia. In the strange, sealed off world portrayed in the 'The Ballad of Googletown' – an eerie, genuine ballad, where the familiar tropes and refrains of ballad are hung out to dry – lives are lived online and social interaction is unnecessary:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe cars are in the drive\u003cbr\u003e\nAnd the bees are in the hive\u003cbr\u003e\nThey say the kids are safe inside\u003cbr\u003e\nIn Googletown\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis new book promises, as Joseph O'Connor has written, all those things 'we go to Mary O'Malley for: truthfulness, seriousness, playfulness, too, and then a particular sort of hesitating and hard-won wisdom, a pushback against nonsense or sentiment or fakery, the beauty of plain words placed in careful order, carefully – and always, the bliss of musicality.'\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Carcanet Press Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53993350168920,"sku":null,"price":17.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781800174146_7bf294f0-0ed4-4a59-b6a2-5b03c2c5990c.jpg?v=1767078920","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/the-shark-nursery","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}