ENDA COYLE-GREENE was born in Dublin in 1954. She lives in Skerries, Co. Dublin with her husband and daughter. She has published widely and is a frequent contributor on RTÉ radio. The manuscript of Snow Negatives won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2006.
Enda Coyle-Greene’s Snow Negatives is an exciting debut from a poet whose work is already well known from literary magazines and journals. In poems that are at once formally alert and alive to the possibilities of new departure, Coyle-Greene records outward journeys and experiences, but always measured against a time when “the slow ash of innocence clung / to the cigarettes we smoked / behind the bicycle sheds” (‘Witches’), and, increasingly, the awareness of mortality and the “eerily familiar” recognitions occasioned by merely going home.
“This is a remarkable collection, assured, measured and adult—poems of loss and consideration, poems that look on the world with a cool, clear eye. The world we say we live in is put under pressure here in poems that manage to be both icily detached and achingly human … This is poetry that is strong, sure, and totally trustworthy … This is poetry of earned authority.”
—from the Judges’ Citation, Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2006
