The Death Poems: Songs, Visons, Meditations explores death in a range of forms - celebratory, visionary and contemplatively, using subject matter as varied as the dust heaps of remains that accumulated in 19th century London to the environmentally toxic ship graveyards at Alang in India. Formally dazzling, Beirne's complex and textured meditations are sobering, spiritual and, in the end, sustaining.

""Everything started to go wrong the day we dragged the Eskimo up in the net off Malin Head. I wasn't long back from Alaska, and it seemed as if he must have followed me halfways around the world. My initial instinct was to pull his chewed up corpse free from the mountain of fish and to roll him overboard, to let him sink back into the depths of the ocean where he had first appeared from, to watch him slip beneath the waves as if he had never surfaced in the first place. Knucky even suggested as much.""

When Jim Gallagher hauls the body of an unknown Eskimo up in his nets off the North West Coast of Ireland, the murky undercurrents of his own life get dragged to the surface. His obsession with finding out where the Eskimo came from, and how he met his watery death, fuses with his own search to understand his life in a small fishing village. Adrift in the mists of alcohol and poor health, Jim loses himself in mystery and subterfuge. Theresa, a returning immigrant, appears to offer the only hope, but as Jim sinks further all of his relationships are threatened. Drink, loneliness and the price of survival become the major themes in this subtly shaded and superbly handled literary debut from one of the best of the New Irish Writers.

Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer living in Canada. He was awarded the "Sunday Tribune"/Hennessy Best Emerging Fiction Writer and New Irish Writer awards in 1996. His work has been published in numerous journals including "Stet--Irish National Literary Magazine," the "Sunday Tribune "newspaper, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. His short story, "Sightings of Bono," was adapted into a short film by Parallel Productions, Ireland, featuring Bono.