THE TIDE

Larry Stapleton’s poetry collection ‘The Tide’ posthumously published by Revival Press, the poetry imprint of the Limerick Writers’ Centre, in 2023.

Praise for ‘The Tide’ :

“Larry Stapleton’s quiet voice and clear-eyed sense of the world combine to produce poems of matter-of-fact clarity and precision, as well as insight. His reverent attentiveness to the landscape, nature, the sea and humanity itself never neglects inclusion of the small wonders – a poet always alert to what he calls the “out of the ordinary things in the day”. Strikingly honest and emotionally direct among these poems are those articulating the poet’s response to loss and the pain of loss, his awareness that we must “get on again with life”. He is a tender poet who knows that language requires rigour and knows too how to apply that rigour.”Larry Stapleton’s quiet voice and clear-eyed sense of the world combine to produce poems of matter-of-fact clarity and precision, as well as insight. His reverent attentiveness to the landscape, nature, the sea and humanity itself never neglects inclusion of the small wonders – a poet always alert to what he calls the “out of the ordinary things in the day”. Strikingly honest and emotionally direct among these poems are those articulating the poet’s response to loss and the pain of loss, his awareness that we must “get on again with life”. He is a tender poet who knows that language requires rigour and knows too how to apply that rigour.”

– Gerard Smyth

“Larry Stapleton brought his environmentalist’s eye to the diverse coast of Wexford, Kerry, the Shannon Estuary, and Sligo in lyrics that celebrate sky and seascape, lagoon, sand-dune, woodland, river, lake and pre-historic site. His intense intimacy with the natural world and his attention to geo-diverse places, and the mysterious processes of nature, inspired poems that are vivid, and memorable. His naming of birds and wildflowers, and his preoccupation with place echoes Michael Longley. Whether he speaks of the life of a turlough, an ancient monument, a ship-wreck, or the loss of his beloved, his poems in The Tide move easily from the local to the global, from place to planet and rhyme to song.”

– Catherine Phil MacCarthy

“A photograph shows those things “some might prefer/were not there” and like the clutter and happenstance that slip into the background, Larry Stapleton’s poems are full of happy surprises. Memory, close observation and love are the engines that drive these attractive and wide-ranging poems. In one outstanding poem the poet stops his car and carries a lost swan back to the river it had strayed from. It seems an entirely appropriate image of this poet’s attentive and restorative gift.”

– Peter Sirr