Alan Garvey

Alan Garvey’s work has been published in various magazines and anthologies. He has read and worked in Toronto, Newfoundland and Budapest, thanks to Arts Council grants. He lives in Carlow with his wife, Tara and sons, Keir and Alastair. His first collection, Herself in Air (2006), was published by Lapwing Publications, Belfast. His second, Learning To Crawl (also on Lapwing) was released early in 2008 and in 2009 he published Terror Haza. He graduated from WIT with a MA in Creative Writing in October 2008.

On ‘Herself in Air’

“An interesting and lively collection… [Garvey] is concerned with conflict, and some of the poems succeed in disturbing.” Books Ireland

“The ‘something amazing’ is tucked into the weave of the work as if the poet was actually looking the other way or writing about dogs who go on with their doggy life. Garvey, like Auden, understands that poetry, life, suffering, takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. When you read from this collection…you experience a poetry that does not require a stage or audience as it can happen anywhere…” Liam Murphy, The Munster Express

Garvey’s affected man-about-town (flâneur) persona is beautifully poised, his nonchalance in the face of the inevitable betrayals which the passage of time inflicts on us, is commendable. [He] has an uncanny facility for turning the stone, exposing the underbelly of new-millennium affluent Ireland, with its many state tyrannies and the little Hitlers who police the new order. Eugene O’Connell, Southword