priced out by Conor Cleary

This pamphlet speaks, in an urbane and charmingly deadpan voice, to anyone who has ever had both an `obsession with luxury resources' and the nagging feeling `you've arrived at the counter of a shop / only to be told what you're carrying isn't legal tender'. The centrepiece of Priced Out is a tender and wry sequence of sonnets addressed `to my mother at my age' which explores the `fat promise' of the nineties economic bubble and its deflated aftermath. Despite their sharp historical awareness, Conor Cleary's poems live unmistakably in the twenty-first century, mapping the contours of a world of goofy Vines, flat-pack Christmas trees, and the barely-suppressed terror of economic precarity. Even as Cleary's speakers agonise over the difficulty of living with others - `what if my gums / concealed big steel / fangs ... that were very / much part of me' - poem after poem reaffirms its commitment to human connection, working towards a calmly bemused acceptance of the dangers and wonders of contemporary existence.
Binding: Paperback / softback