Kirjahaku

Niall O'Sullivan's first collection, 'you're not singing anymore' (flipped eye, 2004), explores religion, youth, and the many faces of London. It was received with widespread acclaim, becoming a 20th Century bestseller on Amazon.co.uk. In 'Ventriloquism for Monkeys, ' his second, he turns his attention to science, memory, evolution and ideology. "Niall O'Sullivan is known as a host and champion of live poetry in London. It's tempting to call his second collection a crossover - yet these don't read like performance pieces tamed for the page, for Niall is no genre hybrid, he is simply a good writer - warm, smart, thoughtful. His poetry inhabits a place where pertinence and impertinence meet." --Roddy Lumsden

For no particular reason, and at no-one else's behest, Niall O'Sullivan set about writing a sonnet a day during the month of September 2010. Never missing his daily deadline, Niall published first drafts with accompanying videos on his website www.niallosullivan.co.uk. The resulting body of work went to places that few sonnets have gone to before: searching for snow leopards on the mountains of Afghanistan; finding erotic links between lycanthropy and botany; joining the final Neanderthal on his last night on Earth; justifying the clown costume bomb disposal scene in Octopussy. Months after the project finished, the poems can now be read for the first time in their finished forms. The Sonnet Hack pamphlet marks the completion of an ambitious project that sought to link formal poetry more intimately to our social condition and our time.

After close to a decade where he has focused on teaching, fatherhood and running London's longest running poetry open mic, Poetry Unplugged, Niall O'Sullivan returns with Werewolf of London, a selection of some of his best known older poems alongside new verse written during his print hiatus. His newer work is still inflected with humour evident in his work since his 2004 début, but he seems to have found in his later work a register that ekes the majesty out of his reflections. Nowhere is this more evident than in the soaring nine-part sequence Now is Not the Time for Politics, which starts out in the realm of fatherhood where 'the mundane becomes so magical'; gathers the whole world and its winters in its span, where the 'warbling beyond our curtain is/ some Pentecostals giving Satan the boot'; and ends where most human interaction begins, with the word 'hello' – except it is uttered from the grave. A gem of fluid, funny, fierce verse.