"Humming" is Maurice Scully's first full-length book of new work since his "Things That Happen" project (1981-2006). Dedicated to the poet's late brother, it places human life in the larger frame of history and pre-history, of a world in drifts of pollen, and other life possibilities over large stretches of time, as well as the domestic & everyday, in which the poetry can score its pollen-like trace knowing.

Maurice Scully was born in Dublin in 1952 and spent his childhood between Clare, the Ring Gaeltacht (or Irish-speaking part of Ireland) and Dublin. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, after which he spent some restless decades between Ireland, Italy, Greece and Africa. In a writing career that began in the early '70s he has published over a dozen volumes of poetry and taken part in conferences and festivals in the UK & US where his readings are prized as key interpretations of his complex, engaging work. The selection in this volume, subtitled A Sampler of Work 1987-2008, was made by the poet himself and draws on the extensive Things That Happen project (1981-2006), as well as three new books, Several Dances, Humming & Work.

Maurice Scully has published several books of poetry over a long writing life, most recently Play Book (Coracle Press, 2019) & Things That Happen (Shearsman, 2020). Things That Happen (1981-2006), is an 8-volume work, revised, corrected & collated as a large single volume for Shearsman, representing a unique achievement in modern Irish letters. A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric, a collection of essays on his work including bibliography & interview with the poet, appeared from Shearsman in 2020. This new work, Airs, shows Scully, at 70, at the height of his powers. 'Scully has a mesmerising capacity to choose ordinary words, to a large extent words that anyone could find themselves saying, & by cleaning off their edges & exactly composing their syllables, transform them from roadstone into fresh-washed pebbles ... brilliance extracted from the everyday...' -Tony Baker, Golden Handcuffs Review on Things That Happen 'Scully is keen to fissure the generalized notion of 'process' that underwrites a good deal of experimental poetry in order to understand it both as a mode of composition and reception. In Several Dances this fissuring occurs as an extended exploration of just how composition and reception are enmeshed within that network of shapes, forms, habits and orientations that we too quickly gloss as genre. Scully raises the stakes of this investigation by thinking across the arts...' -Eric Falci in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric, on Several Dances 'The books are meticulously planned, considerably sectioned, divided, subdivided and numbered ... but can you genuinely find your way around? It's Borgesian ... both planned and haywire, with parallelism, doubling back, intersections and loops, signposts bearing the same names pointing to different things.' -Mairead Byrne in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric on Things That Happen

Finally in one volume, this book brings together all the various parts of Maurice Scully's magnum opus, written over a 25-year period: 5 Freedoms of Movement, Livelihood, Sonata and Tig. The largest of those individual releases, Livelihood, has long been out of print, as (now) is Sonata, thus leaving interested readers with only the opening movement and the closing coda of the whole work. The author has revised the entire work for this edition, and the book is accompanied by a separate volume of essays on Maurice Scully's work, edited by Kenneth Keating.

"(Scully's) innovations...take a modernist inheritance, strip it of any redisual mythos, & use it to examine the interaction of the writer's reflecting mind with the daily life of everybody...& truly, if one seeks a poetry of the moment that records & wryly critiques the inequities of modern life, Maurice Scully's is it." - Marthine Satris

'Tig' is the last part of a vast poetic undertaking by Irish poet Maurice Scully that bears the overall title "Things That Happen." (Earlier parts are the trilogy 'Five Freedoms of Movement', 'Livelihood', and 'Sonata'; 'Tig' is the coda to the whole work.) Twenty-five years in the writing, "Things That Happen" is an epic in the way that Pound's 'Cantos' were epic: a vortex that pulls in content, influences, autobiography, observation and language(s). Although part of a greater whole, 'Tig' can be read perfectly well on its own.