The Wrong Side of the Alps includes many of the poems for which Anthony Glavin won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. It contains a number of exquisite lyrics and a remarkable extended sequence.
Among the shorter poems are meditations on art, literary figures and the precariousness of human relationships. These are laced with ironies and self-deprecation. The three sections of ‘Living in Hiroshima’ collected here offer glancing images of modern history, and prove a memorable and compassionate focus of an unusually accomplished first collection.
