Let the Dead by Dylan Brennan
112 pages
Paperback
8 June 2023
ISBN: 978-1-8383126-9-5
Deeply attuned to those things that make and unmake us, Dylan Brennan’s Let the Dead concerns itself with life’s alchemical processes.
A couple breathe life into a doomed poppet; a photographer immortalises a corpse; Joyce and Breton rub shoulders on the streets of the poet’s adopted Mexico, where life is a tapestry of ‘delicate anthers’ and ‘disembodied tongues’. These dark meditations are set against poems which consider love, miscarriage, childbirth and the daily miracle of family life.
Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico’s shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where ‘things in the ground have a tendency to grow.’ Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist’s responsibility in a time of violence.
About the Author
Dylan Brennan’s debut poetry collection, Blood Oranges (The Dreadful Press, 2014), was awarded the Patrick Kavanagh Award runner-up prize. In 2016 he co-edited Rethinking Juan Rulfo’s Creative World: Prose, Photography, Film with Prof. Nuala Finnegan, and in 2017 he collaborated on Guadalupe & Other Hallucinations, an illustrated e-book, with visual artist Jonathan Brennan. He is a recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry bursary award. He lives in Mexico City.
Author photo by Liliana Pérez-Brennan
Media
New poetry: Jane Clarke, Maura Dooley, Airea Matthews and Dylan Brennan | The Irish Times | 21 August 2023
Let the Dead by Dylan Brennan – Poetry in Focus | RTE Culture | 12 July 2023
When I didn’t know what to write I turned to the dead, more specifically, The Dead | The Irish Times | 9 June 2023
Praise for Let the Dead
“Dylan Brennan writes of ‘the need to perceive all the things of this earth’, and this collection succeeds not just in perceiving, but exhibiting the glow and sometimes the horror, the galactic variety, the soft places and flaming intensities that fill our human world. He writes on the borders of life and of death, on the frontiers of cultures, in poems shot full of colour and obliquely illuminated, so that the simple truth of complex live reality is memorably displayed.”
“Dylan Brennan is one of the most vital Irish poets writing today. Let the Dead injects its speaker and the language of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ with a powerful defamiliarising agent. We listen in on made-otherworldly experiences in Mexico and Ireland – of bog cotton, coriander, onion and lime, of miscarriage and new parenthood, of the births and deaths of a made-close ‘you’, of the universe and its grasshoppers and ‘new world vultures’. Though ‘the border solidifies’, Brennan’s poetic rigour in short verse, prose and poetic sequences ‘coax[es] [us] back to wonder’.”
“Instead of prompting the completion of the Biblical phrase, ‘Let the dead bury the dead’, Dylan Brennan’s collection invites readers to Let the Dead be alive … This book attests that by entering into resonance with human suffering, only poetry can show us life hidden in death, thereby offering consolation.”
“Let the Dead, the eagerly awaited second full collection by Dylan Brennan, consolidates a deft and versatile lyric gift, one capable of shoring effortlessly from a gentle almost spectral lyricism to unblinking social critique. It’s a collection that spans oceans, hemispheres, millennia, shaping a kinetic and blended landscape, where the aromas, the colour-scheme, the very soils of Mexico and Ireland are combined. It brings forces from the depths of geological time into our inscrutable present, harnessing them with emphatic, seemingly effortless panache.”
“I love the variety of forms—haibun, prose poem, short lyric, mythic sequence—into which Dylan Brennan pours his intense poetic brew. If it is a dark concoction it is brilliantly flavored with the bitterness of stout and the spice of Mexican hot chocolate, a mélange of languages and histories from both sides of the Atlantic. If that sounds too exotic, know that at heart this is a book about family—about the risk and magic of bringing a child into our troubled world— and therefore truly universal.”
“At turns savage – fierce and insistent as the epiphanic black of vultures circling – then with a touch as light as bog cotton, Let the Dead finds Dylan Brennan tender and attentive to the ritual of death; a narrative that entwines each and every one of us back through a glacial time.”
“A collection of poems that are so utterly savage in their beauty, they defy form and categorisation ... the dead are always with us, the layers of the past are keenly felt, history is reimagined and respected and pain is always close. From brilliant reworkings of Joyce, to the ekphrastic, Brennan’s post-colonial poetics of both Ireland and Mexico weave a timeless, seamless tapestry. Exquisite.”