Savage Tales

Winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2024 Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2023 Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2023 Tara Bergin's third collection, Savage Tales continues to explore original territory, bringing the riddle, song and dialogue into a series of formally inventive and blackly comic sequences. Bergin's book asks us to steer our way through a chorus of exchanges and situations, as she charts the fraught course between the making of individual poems and, uneasy bedfellow of this sustained activity, an authority which is always here called into question. Dramatizing the contemporary and the classic with great wit, ingenuity and panache, Savage Tales confirms Bergin as one of the outstanding poets of our time.

Tara Bergin is an Irish poet. Her first collection, This is Yarrow (2013), won the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry, and the Shine/Strong Award for best first collection by an Irish author. She received an Arts Council Ireland Literature Bursary to write her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (2017), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and chosen as Best Poetry Book of the year by The Times and The Irish Times. She now lives in the North of England.