The Architect's Dream of Winter

A world of machines, machine management and communication is at the heart of Cork-born Irish poet Billy Ramsell's second collection of poems. From credit card point-of-sale devices to personal music players, from mobile phones to cardiac supports, the world is seen as enabled, criss-crossed and perhaps even bound by digital signals that between them comprise a new life force on the planet, and one we have scarcely begun to comprehend. "Billy Ramsell is one of the younger poets who has most fruitfully brought into Ireland the best influences of a British generation including Don Paterson, Michael Donaghy and Ian Duhig - formal sophistication allied to natural spoken idiom, an appetite for the minutiae of contemporary life as eclectic as Paul Muldoon, and an unforced, often witty merging of the public with the intimate. In coming years, he should have much to give to an Irish tradition he has already helped to expand." - Harry Clifton "Billy Ramsell's latest collection crosses into the digital landscape to recognize our interior selves, to reclaim that which is human within the synapse of machine, the terabyte of memory. Elegiac, mythic, formally inventive, and more, the poems in this volume span from the circuit board to the cosmos and, all the while, remain focused on the human heart." - Brian Turner BILLY RAMSELL was born in Cork in 1977 and educated at the North Monastery and UCC. Complicated Pleasures, his first collection, was published by the Dedalus Press in 2007. He holds the Chair of Ireland Bursary for 2013 and has been shortlisted for several other prizes. He edits the Irish section of the Poetry International website and co-runs an educational publishing company.