Father's Father's Father by Dane Holt
Dane Holt’s subject is often the aftermath of tragedy – ecological, personal or social – but these poems grieve in surprising ways. Deflection, displacement and refracted voices combine to animate a world of brilliantly realised situations. And Holt’s characters, though always articulate, do not precisely comprehend their own relation to what they inherit.
Compelling, funny, endlessly inventive, this bold debut collection explores the formation and disillusion of masculinity and community, exposing just how tender and brittle these constructs are.
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2025.
Dane Holt’s subject is often the aftermath of tragedy – ecological, personal or social – but these poems grieve in surprising ways. Deflection, displacement and refracted voices combine to animate a world of brilliantly realised situations. And Holt’s characters, though always articulate, do not precisely comprehend their own relation to what they inherit.
Compelling, funny, endlessly inventive, this bold debut collection explores the formation and disillusion of masculinity and community, exposing just how tender and brittle these constructs are.
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2025.
Dane Holt’s subject is often the aftermath of tragedy – ecological, personal or social – but these poems grieve in surprising ways. Deflection, displacement and refracted voices combine to animate a world of brilliantly realised situations. And Holt’s characters, though always articulate, do not precisely comprehend their own relation to what they inherit.
Compelling, funny, endlessly inventive, this bold debut collection explores the formation and disillusion of masculinity and community, exposing just how tender and brittle these constructs are.
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2025.
About the Author
Dane Holt holds a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast. His debut pamphlet, Many Professional Wrestlers Never Retire (Lifeboat Press), was published in 2023 and was a Poetry Book Society Autumn Pamphlet Choice. In 2019, he won the inaugural Brotherton Prize, awarded by the University of Leeds. He was the 2023 Ciaran Carson Publishing Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Belfast.
Praise for Father’s Father’s Father
'Holt is part of a feisty new generation of Northern Irish poets, and his stunning debut collection nods to Samuel Beckett with its injunction to fail. ... In these dazzling re-envisagings of a state at war with itself, Holt finds a way to talk directly about what other poets have only been able to allude to, and in doing so he offers us, through absurdist comedy, a fleeting glimpse of a way out of the mess.'
— Philip Terry, The Guardian
'In Dane Holt's Father's Father's Father there are delicate parables, surreal narrations, moving and direct lyrics, and cameos from unexpected quarters (Tammy Wynette? John Cena?), but wherever the poems go, the tone is convincing, the line controlled, and a lovely obliquity pushes against the emotional pressure. It's a wonderfully inventive and auspicious debut.'
— Nick Laird
'Dane Holt zooms us through the chaos of grief, suspends us from our heels and makes us weep, then forces us to laugh against our will. One of the best debuts I've read in years.'
— Caroline Bird
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Date Published: 27 March 2025
Paperback, 72 pages
ISBN: 9781800174689
