"Tom Paulin is among the best of a great generation of Irish poets." The Sunday Telegraph
Few contemporary poets can boast of having an indie rock band named after them, but Tom Paulin is not a typical poet. Over the last forty years, Paulin has built a reputation as a formidable (and often contrary) thinker, inspiring a devoted following with his impassioned appearances on the BBC’s Late Review, and his poetry is equally provocative, original, and unabashedly political. His first collection, A State of Justice, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1977, and since then Paulin has emerged as one of the leading poets of his generation, celebrated for his linguistic dexterity and a poetic range that sees him conjure everything from the Belfast of his childhood to the Treaty of Versailles. His first Selected Poems was published back in 1993, but in the last twenty years Paulin has published several acclaimed collections, including The Wind Dog, Love’s Bonfire and The Invasion Handbook, the first volume of an epic project on the Second World War. A fresh selection has long been overdue, and now, to celebrate the launch of his New Selected Poems, Paulin reads some of his best-known work. Presented in association with the MA in Poetry Studies at the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies, Mater Dei Institute.