Born in Dublin in 1958, Michael O'Loughlin has been among most arresting voices in Irish poetry since his debut, Stalingrad, the Street Dictionary, in 1980. His earlier collections were from the perspective of the Irish emigrant in European cities - casting a cold eye on the Irish experience, while locating it within the broader European historical narrative. Now in his new collection - his first for a decade - he brings a new sensibility to bear on the disturbing realities of the Ireland he found on his return to his native city. He does so firstly through poems in his own voice, detailing the death of friends and family members, where he attempts to go beyond the given norms of family and society. But in a series of poems ostensibly translated from the Latvian, he also employs the voice of a fictional Latvian poet, Mikelis Norgelis, an immigrant to Ireland. Mikelis is not just an outside observer of Irish life and culture, but brings his own baggage from Eastern Europe, the place which provided O'Loughlin with metaphors for his earlier work. This proves another kind of homecoming for a poet described by The Poetry Review (London) as A writer of intense power - [with] poems of force, power, strength and surge. It is the refusal to get bogged down, the willingness to write afresh, that gives the poems their intensity.A"