Caustically humorous and polemically compulsive, Trump Rant is a work of meticulous political portraiture: a deep-delving and epoch-spanning investigation into the nature of power in American life, made luminous by Agee's nuanced, exploratory understanding of authoritarian drift and thwarted democratic aspiration in a number of world-historical contexts, from Belfast to the Balkans to the formerly Confederate South. Free-roaming in its breadth of reference and tonal range, the Rant is at once viscerally personal and unsettlingly resonant, infused throughout with an almost hypnotic sense of scale, largesse, and historical moment. Already renowned as a poet of emotional delicacy and singular stylistic vision, Agee's hallmark gifts of writerly intimacy and ethical resolve are here expanded and reconfigured on a panoramic canvas - moving from a pared-back opening section to the accelerating pace and barrage-like linguistic assaults of the latter addenda. But for all its freewheeling furies, shifting emotional registers and Kubrick-like black humour, it remains a remarkably formal work, moored to the relentlessly dangerous drumbeat of Donald J. Trump. The result is a combination of long-form radicalism and eclectic satire, startingly unique in its blend of aphorism, acuity and epic cultural imagining. Composed chronologically for nearly four years (from early 2017 until Election Day 2020), Trump Rant is a triumph of artistic witness and denunciation; an urgent retort to a global culture of imperilled legal standards and depleted literary response; and an incisive model of enlightenment and outrage in a "post-truth" world being visibly darkened by its criminal shadows.

The Editors of Irish Pages - Chris Agee, Cathal O Searcaigh, Kathleen Jamie and Meg Bateman - have assembled a new issue of the journal, entitled "The Anthropocene." It aims to evoke the escalating global ecological crisis in the round, through many of its key components, including climate change, deforestation, the treatment of animals, oceanic pollution and over-fishing, the melting of glaciers, extinctions, land-use, plastic pollution and the waste crisis, the eco-vandalism of mining and the fashion industry, the extermination of indigenous peoples and languages, biodiversity and ecocide generally, and so on - and on. * A certain amount of poetry and prose deals with humanity and human consciousness more generally, in their historical, cultural, psychological, artistic and religious dimensions. * There is also a special section devoted to writing on the Pandemic. * As with other issues, however, there is also work included that does not bear explicitly on the theme of the issue.

Helen Lewis' acclaimed memoir, A Time to Speak (Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1997), tells the story of the first thirty years of her life in Czechoslovakia, from childhood to her professional training as a choreographer and dancer. It also contains her devastating account of Nazi persecution, of loss and suffering in the Holocaust: Helen came very close to death. Maddy Tongue now completes the story of this extraordinary woman who overcame unimaginable suffering to become a creative force in Ireland. The author's friendship with Helen lasted for more than fifty years. As a dancer she performed in many of Helen's significant works. Shadows Behind the Dance describes Helen's creative approach, her struggle to overcome an Irish indifference to modern dance, her pursuit of perfection and her unshakeable belief in humanity. In Ireland today the presence of modern dance owes much to her innovative teaching and practice. Shadows Behind the Dance is supplemented with Chris Agee's 2002 interview with Helen, "An Irish Epilogue", and a folio of Holocaust poems and drawings by Michael Longley and Sarah Longley (who was a pupil of Helen's). Helen's sons, Robin and Michael, have also written a Foreword. The book has been generously funded through subscription by family, friends, colleagues and admirers of the unforgettable Helen Lewis.

A hardback reprint of the classic Irish Pages issue on Seamus Heaney to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death on 30 August 2013. “So many people in Ireland and overseas read, admired, and watched him. The extraordinary degree to which Heaney was a creative and ethical exemplar, shaper, mentor, influence, and generous friend for his fellow poets and writers comes through especially powerfully in this book, with its 54 contributors from Ireland, Britain, the United States and further afield...” Including four last poems by Seamus Heaney, this truly commemorative volume is sure to sell in very large numbers. Sven Birkerts and Helen Vendler on the man and the poet. A Suite of Obituaries & Global Reminiscences by leading poets and writers in Ireland, Britain and the United States. Poems by Kerry Hardie, Michael Coady, Paddy Bushe, Kathleen Jamie, Katie Donovan, Seán Lysaght, Damian Smyth, Ignatius McGovern, John F. Deane, Francis Harvey, Michael Longley, Alan Gillis, Moya Cannon and Harry Clifton. President Michael D. Higgins on John Hewitt & Richard Murphy on poetry and terror. Writing in Irish from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh and others. PLUS: “Seamus Justin Heaney 1939-2013”, a unique photographic portfolio by Bobbie Hanvey.