Published 2014. Paperback, 138pp, 9 x 6ins
ISBN 978-1-84861-336-2 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

This book is not a 'collection' of 'poems', or not quite. Something odd is going on: things repeat, vary, develop, disappear to reappear skewed and the book ends, then doesn't. And the 'poems' involve events in literature, poetry we all know, and some we don't, and the writing brings them in a dance across time into the mind along with the life of the moment. Moments in time are not frozen, things that happen are not selected, highlighted and described. They just happen. Fluid energy is taken on for what it is, and that's the way things are.

‘The sheer concreteness of [Scully’s] writing mirrors the desire to present what is , with minimal interference from the vanity of the writing ego. The world is not presented as a stage set for the acting out of some human drama but as a complex system of which the human domain is just a part... this is a poetry of learning to live with and in the world, not explaining and improving on it.’ —Billy Mills, Sustainable Poetry

“(Scully’s) innovations... take a modernist inheritance, strip it of any residual mythos, and use it to examine the interaction of the writer’s reflecting mind with the daily life of everybody... and truly, if one seeks a poetry of the moment that records and wryly critiques the inequities of modern life, Maurice Scully’s is it.” —Marthine Satris

“(Scully’s Things That Happen ) is the most ambitious & important long poem in modern Irish literature.” —Eric Falci, on the Things That Happen project (1981–2006)

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