Released November 30th, 2024 // 104 pages // 978-1-916938-60-1 // RRP: £12.99
Traversing an axis of Liverpool-London, and following a car accident in New York, The Overmind is an attempt to metabolise experience whilst seeing the world through the skin of a jellyfish. In lyric poems and sequences, Byrne summons his Irish and English working-class ancestry, asking questions against injustice to those in power. These poems are written through grief, illness and silence, where the author’s love for his daughter during periods of separation is powerfully connected with his own father’s dementia. Mythogeographic, linguistically adept and restlessly explorative of social and personal space, The Overmind is Byrne’s seventh full collection of poems and his most powerful work to date.
PRAISE for The Overmind:
In The Overmind, I think we do ‘enter the interlude’, a between-place full of spectral distortions, subconscious stirrings, subterranean mutterings. It’s a collection with a keen ear to the infrasound; it catches words half-heard, sees things slant through smoke or shadow.
Byrne’s book is ghostly, in that it is populated by apparitions. It is also ghostly in that it enacts kind of portable haunting, a ‘poltergeist among [the] living ghosts’ of history, literature and contemporary culture. There’s a playfulness at work here, a restless, tricksy engagement with traditions of art and forms of language, that’s both spooky and disruptive.
There are those who exist on the periphery, whose music is made in the undersong. I think that’s who this collection is for – the working-classes, the ghosts in the machine.
— Fran Lock
After reading The Overmind, you are immediately impressed by James Byrne’s steely, yet tensile intelligence, and by the cognitive concentration he exerts on each poem, as though using a kind of pressure-valve syntax, which in each compressed statement feels as if it could burst and let seep, at any moment, the hiss of any still unused imagination. By imparting unremitting torque direct to every word and image, the poetic voice creates an immense repellent to any linguistic slack. Reason enough it seems to read this collection, for amid Byrne’s subversion of the written word and the masterful way in which he keeps language in a state of (almost) aporetic equilibrium, the readers will realize, almost at once, that they are encountering one of the least ponderous minds in contemporary poetry, and one of its most Promethean voices.
— Paul Stubbs
ABOUT James Byrne:
James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. He has published seven full collections, including Of Breaking Glass (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). A longtime teacher of poetry and transnational poetics, he has co-edited and co-translated several books, including Ro Mehrooz’s Poems Written Through Barbed-wire Fences, a collection of Rohingya language poems, and Ashur Etwebi’s Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution. A Selected Poems of his work is forthcoming in February 2025.
