Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real: 15 (The Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets)

Padraig Regan s poems delight in the sensual and the visual: this pamphlet is alive with the textures of paint, sweat, sugar and overripe fruit. Regan riffs on art history in a way which is playful and inquisitive, bringing together Johann Zoffany and David Hockney for mojitos by a California pool.

Other poems focus on the representation of the human body. They discover alternative histories in responses to paintings where the gaze of male artists is directed towards the male fgure in queerly erotic ways.

A pair of poems titled Glory reads the iconography of Elizabeth I as a kind of drag act for the body politic, and the fnal sequence is a dazzling, near-Cubist display, shedding light on Caravaggio s pictures of a young male model from a variety of revealing angles.

Padraig Regan was born and lives in Belfast. They graduated with an MA from the Seamus Heaney Centre. In 2015 he received an Eric Gll Award for his poetry and his debut pamphlet Delicious was published in 2016.