Gub by Scott McKendry
Demons, geese, The Laughing Cow, marching bands, LSD and pistols smuggled home from the USSR. You'll find all these in Scott McKendry's GUB. Rooted in the language of working-class Belfast, and slipping between eras and time zones, closing the gap between the real and the fantastical, the academic and the everyday, the parish and the polis, McKendry's exhilarating debut collection comes to terms with generational trauma, social decay and the rituals of a place with a fraught history and an uncertain future.
Invoking the balaclava'd gunmen, urban warlords and explosions which gripped the decades either side of the Good Friday Agreement, GUB drags the language of ghettoised Belfast into serious Irish poetry. Wearing the lyrical influences of his 'ugly city' lightly - Carson, McGuckian, Longley - McKendry's tightly-wrought structures weave an unprecedented verse of mourning, witness, alter ego, class alienation and aesthetic turmoil. Noisy, dark and witty, GUB is an utterly new voice out of Belfast, but one posting bulletins across inner-city neighbourhoods everywhere.
About the Author
Scott McKendry is from North Belfast. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review. Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of a Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2019, and his pamphlet, Curfuffle (Lifeboat) was Poetry Book Society Autumn Choice 2019. McKendry also writes essays and criticism. He's currently a Lecturer of Practice at Queen's University Belfast.
Praise for Gub
“Gub is unlike anything I have ever read. In a playful demotic that is exhilarating, hilarious and never forced, Scott McKendry makes magic of a Belfast that in other hands would make grim reading. The most exciting poet to come out of the north of Ireland in many years”
Louise Kennedy, author of Tresspasses
”McKendry does something truly radical with this book. Even at its most phantasmagorical, it combines intense philosophical inquiry with a profound familiarity with the terrain on which his world is built and the people who populate it. Gub is a work comparable in scope and import to Ciaran Carson's Belfast Confetti. Like Carson, McKendry's ear is attuned to the cadence of the city's "speech and slabber", which he transposes, with great aplomb, to the upper echelons of contemporary poetry. Gub is one of the funniest books I've ever read, and one of the most moving. It parses the ironies, contradictions and shortcomings of the working-class Belfast I know with moments of incredible beauty. There is nothing else like this in Irish poetry. A lyrical savant of the highest level, and one of the most exciting writers in Ireland today, McKendry is utterly his own beast”
Michael Nolan, author of Close To Home
“A distinctive and energetic voice”
Sunday Times Ireland
“Scott McKendry's poems are exhilarants; richly textured, gregarious, sublimely sophisticated. The extraordinary ambit of his language ... is interwoven, irrevocably, with its pleasures. Gub, as noun, carries the trace of its verb: it is gastronomic and discerning, but it makes no bones about how the sausage is made. And rather than bend the local to the universe, the universe is drawn to these poems: migratory geese, the Flintstones, the small delinquencies of childhood and teenhood. And the author's new orthography for his 'Belfastois'. Gub is a world you don't know and don't know you know. In the company of these magisterial, unique, frequently hilarious poems, you'll wonder where you've been”
Stephen Sexton, author of IF ALL THE WORLD AND LOVE WERE YOUNG
Publisher: Corsair
Date Published: 1 February 2024
Paperback, 96 pages
ISBN: 9781472158086
