This is my new pamphlet, Into the Earth, published by Live Canon in April 2021, available from all good bookshops an direct from Live Canon’s online store, here.
This is my debut collection, The Empty Horizon, which won Live Canon’s First Collection Competition, judged by Glyn Maxwell, in 2015, and was published by Live Canon in August 2017.
Conceived and mostly written while I was studying on the MA programme for Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, The Empty Horizon is a sequence of interconnected poems, adding up to something like a narrative, concerning the plight of Roisin, a children’s author and illustrator coping with encroaching sight loss while trapped in a bad situation in the seaside town of Dawlish, in South Devon.
Paul Carney’s poetry is airborne, delicately balanced between soaring, full flight and hovering just above ground. In his striking debut collection, we move through currents of the imagination of both the poet and the narrator-character of these poems; Roisin, a writer of children’s books navigates her way through the changing vista of her increasingly impaired vision. She fleshes out her fictional world, creating, in the publisher she has never met, a desired figure to share her solitary life. The detail is rich and fresh, the language moving and surprising. These are poems envisioned through the acute eye of an illustrator; Carney keeps the reader aloft, transfixed on the image.
Barbara Marsh (poet, musician, teacher, and winner of the 2015 Troubadour Poetry Prize)
This feels exactly like being plonked down in the middle of a novel… the end is as obscure as an episode of The Prisoner… It’s a change from the usual unconnected lyrical moments to read a collection with a narrative thread and a developing character voice (and incidentally, this male author does a female voice very well, mostly by not falling into the trap of thinking of her as a different species)…
Sheenagh Pugh (poet and novelist)
How deftly and poignantly this poet puts his finger on it… I keep noticing Paul Carney’s poems, and I believe you will, too.
Glyn Maxwell (poet, playwright, educator and judge of Live Canon’s First Collection Competition)
Undeniably beautiful…
Carmina Masoliver (poet, anthologist and reviewer) in the Norwich Radical
The Empty Horizon is available in all good bookshops (bookshops that don’t have it are, therefore, bad bookshops), from Amazon or directly from Live Canon’s own website. Actually, that’s probably your best option, because while you’re on their publications page, which is here, you’ll surely find something to tempt you among Live Canon’s plethora of other books, both individual collections and anthologies.
The Empty Horizon is now available as an audio book, with Roisin’s words voiced beautifully by the wonderful actor, Nichole Bird. It can be ordered from Audible and is also available on iTunes.
Here’s Nichole working her magic in the studio.
Poems by Paul also appear in these Live Canon anthologies:
