Gub

'Gub is unlike anything I have ever read. In a playful demotic that is
exhilarating, hilarious and never forced, Scott McKendry makes magic of a
Belfast that in other hands would make grim reading. The most exciting poet to
come out of the north of Ireland in many years' Louise Kennedy, author of
Tresspasses

'There is nothing else like this in Irish poetry. A lyrical savant of the
highest level, and one of the most exciting writers in Ireland today, McKendry
is utterly his own beast' Michael Nolan, author of Close To Home

'A distinctive and energetic voice' Sunday Times Ireland

'McKendry is a joyful liar, a storyteller... McKendry writes "life's not
synonymous with pain" and it's this sense, of a kind of all-encompassing
appetite, that marks him out as fine company' Declan Ryan


Demons, geese, The Laughing Cow, marching bands, LSD and pistols smuggled home
from the USSR. You'll find all these in Scott McKendry's GUB.

Rooted in the language of working-class Belfast, and slipping between eras and
time zones, closing the gap between the real and the fantastical, the academic
and the everyday, the parish and the polis, McKendry's exhilarating debut
collection comes to terms with generational trauma, social decay and the
rituals of a place with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

Invoking the balaclava'd gunmen, urban warlords and explosions which gripped
the decades either side of the Good Friday Agreement, GUB drags the language
of ghettoised Belfast into serious Irish poetry. Wearing the lyrical
influences of his 'ugly city' lightly - Carson, McGuckian, Longley -
McKendry's tightly-wrought structures weave an unprecedented verse of
mourning, witness, alter ego, class alienation and aesthetic turmoil.

Noisy, dark and witty, GUB is an utterly new voice out of Belfast, but one
posting bulletins across inner-city neighbourhoods everywhere.