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Paul Perry is an award-winning poet and novelist. He has co-authored four international bestselling novels as Karen Perry, and his own novels The Garden and Paradise House (2025, Somerville Press) are critically acclaimed. He is a Professor at UCD where he directs The Mary Lavin Centre for Creative Writing. He has won the Hennessy Prize and the Listowel Poetry Prize, and has written five poetry collections, the last of which was shortlisted for the Farmgate Prize for Poetry. Clockhammer is Paul’s first book with Doire Press.
Paul Perry’s Clockhammer is a profound book of middle age, in which we find a serious and accomplished poet writing at the height of his powers.
— Wayne Miller
Beguile —
this shopping list,
half-forgotten.
Sausages.
And newspapers.
Inky-smudged fingertips
to your lips.
Or seagulls outside a church.
Pray for me.
In the kitchen,
in 1985.
Time, a broken eggshell,
a piece of burnt toast.
A life, still —
the photograph of memory
not sepia-toned, but stellar,
and animal, like the husbandry
of our foremothers,
and their mothers too.
My mother’s favourite words.
Her shadow words,
her Iberia,
Siberia.
Her father.
The handmade Christmas presents.
The shambles of today.
The memories like prayers.
The news like weeds,
in a garden you left behind.
And a kitchen.
Generous to a fault.
Her, Get!
And her mother’s songs.
Her care, endurance, and forbearance.
Her soul, and unarticulated
words, just out of reach:
salt-shaker, thingamajig,
her father, her brothers.
Your sisters! and the holy ghost,
ah the holy ghost, amen to her too.
ISBN: 978-1-915877-05-5 | Pages: 80 | Year published: 2025
Clockhammer is a collection obsessed with time—not merely its passage, but its pressures, distortions, absences, and residues. Time here is not linear but recursive, spectral, and spatial: ‘the garden of the clock grows wild,’ he writes in ‘The Topology of Time’. This is a book that treats chronology as unreliable narration, where memory and its ghosts step forward not as testimony but as presence. In this way, Clockhammer is an elegy not for a single person or place, but for multiple selves—each one flickering in and out of being.
This book is available for pre-orders only. Pre-orders will be sent out mid-October.