On Purpose

Description

Laird's debut collection, To a Fault (2005), signalled the arrival of a significant new talent, 'doing more, in its range and ambition' wrote The Independent. On Purpose confirms the promise of that first book and shows the author hitting new and yet more athletic strides. Blending tones of assurance and delicacy, of confidence and vulnerability, On Purpose is a collection of poems that takes care and consideration in examining the often brutal arena of human relations, concluding with mercurial and affecting sequence about a marriage, which takes, as its point of departure, that most influential of military treatise, The Art of War.

Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and former lawyer. His poetry collections are To A Fault, On Purpose and Go Giants. A new volume, Glitch, is forthcoming in 2018. His novels are Utterly Monkey, Glover's Mistake and Modern Gods. Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he co-edited the anthology The Zoo of the New with Don Paterson, and is currently a Writer-in-Residence at New York University.

"'Nick Laird's To a Fault watches the weight and measure of every word with a mixture of irony and tender loving care' Observer"