The Salt Harvest is the debut collection from a startling new talent, Eoghan Walls. Dark and evocative, these poems carry rich, multi-layered descriptions of the natural world, and cast a sardonic yet tender eye over the human condition.

All the climates of his native Ireland inspire poems of muscular imagery and complex form, each line ‘packed with ore’. There is also an ambivalent, often deeply ironic attitude towards a culture once steeped in religion. Threads of humour run throughout, an imaginative playfulness evident in ‘Martin Healey’s War on God and Ireland’, ‘Frog’ and ‘Star Matter’.

“In Walls poetry we find an acute sensitivity to register, the voice hesitant, casual, mild, and, in its own way, open to anything.”
John Redmond

Eoghan Walls won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, and recently completed a PhD in English Literature at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast. He has taught English in Ireland as well as in Heidelberg, Rwanda, and for the Open University. His poem ‘The Naming of the Rat’ was featured in Granta’s New Writing 14 (2006); while his other work has appeared widely in magazines like Poetry London, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review and The London Magazine, and he appears regularly at poetry festivals and reading events.