Some Integrity

Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021

In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects:

whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room we
happen to be sitting in
is dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever
portion of the sky that happens

to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The
weather also happens,
as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other places
where it falls into the orbit of the glass.

'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world,' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty'. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.