Some Integrity

Book excerpt: Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023 Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2023 Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023 Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023 Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022 Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021 In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects: whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room we happen to be sitting in is dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever portion of the sky that happens to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The weather also happens, as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other places where it falls into the orbit of the glass. 'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world,' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty'. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.