The Irish card - Brendan Cleary

The Irish Card deals out poems from the double life of an exiled Irish poet: going off his head in the smart-arse Memos to Sensitive Eddie and other performance pieces; going back inside in The Irish Card, a new sequence of deeply personal poems on rootlessness, inner exile and estrangement.

Brendan Cleary was born in Carrickfergus in 1958 and attended Carrickfergus Grammar School. In 1977 he left Northern Ireland for Middlesbrough to attend Teesside Polytechnic. He then settled in Newcastle, where he founded Echo Room Press, was a co-editor of Stand magazine, and earned an MA from Sunderland Polytechnic. He now lives in Brighton, East Sussex, working as a poetry teacher and as artistic director for the regional poetry organisation The South, as well as performing his poetry regularly on radio, at festivals and in schools.
Always an activist for small press culture, before Cleary published his first full-length collection The Irish Card with Bloodaxe Books in 1993, many of his pamphlets appeared with such presses as Jackson's Arm Press, Smith/Doorstop and Wide Skirt.
His second full-length collection Sacrilege, also with Bloodaxe, appeared in 1998, followed in 2001 by Stranger in the House (Wrecking Ball Press). Three further collections followed from tall-lighthouse before Face from Pighog in 2013.

These new poems are sad movies of Irish soul…Brendan Cleary's given up his joker for the ace of hearts. He's left the pub for the confessional, blabbering his tale of woe like a late night wag who's high on the muse and the music, tearful and brilliant like Country & Western without the crassness and religion, a kind of Irish Hank Williams on acid.

He is a romantic, but an angry one, a seedy one, though self-mockingly so. He wants to be innocent again, and is pissed off at how things have been messed up.
Scratch - Mark Robinson