Well now. I cannot believe that my debut poetry collection, Blood Oranges, was first launched in Cork ten years ago today. I am very grateful to the publishers (The Dreadful Press) and to anyone who showed up in Cork, or at the Galway, Dublin and Mexico City launches. Special thanks to those who did the intros: Billy Ramsell (Cork), Sarah Clancy (Galway), Jack Little (Mexico City) and the late Macdara Woods (Dublin). I’m very grateful to anyone who has read and/or recommended the book to others over the years and those who reviewed it. I am including some snippets of praise for Blood Oranges below with links. Blood Oranges had a very limited print run and is now unavailable. The Dreadful Press has since ceased operations. It can be bought on Kindle. However, I would like to send a PDF copy of the book to any of my readers who would like one. Simply post a photo of your copy of Let the Dead (or Blood Oranges) and tag me on social media. Instagram: @dylan.brennan.lit Bluesky: @dylanbrennan.bsky.social This offer will stand until the end of the year.
Praise for Blood Oranges
‘It’s astounding, actually… [There is an] “urgent sense of the violence of history, not only as something that’s far removed from us, in fact, quite the opposite, as something that is very close to us, very present’—Philip Coleman for RTÉ Radio One’s The Poetry Programme.
‘Blood Oranges, then, is an achieved and completed thing. But let’s think of it as a light house or a way-station rather than as a terminus [...] but the first step in what for my money will be an extraordinary poetic journey, [...] it gestures toward future poetic excavations into history’s zest and sorrow, past known and unfamiliar denominations, down through hitherto unbreached layers’—Billy Ramsell at the Cork launch of Blood Oranges.
‘There has been a bit of a buzz surrounding the publication of his début, and I think that’s right. Brennan is a big shot’—Ailbhe Darcy for The Burning Bush 2.
‘BUY THIS BOOK [...] Dylan’s poetry is full of life and death, of flesh and seeds, fertility and of constant renewal and ever present extinction. It’s a meditation on the persistence of violence, and the parallel persistence of life’—Sarah Clancy for the Galway launch of Blood Oranges.
‘They are poems that bow to life but are not bowed by it’—Alan Jude Moore for Poetry Ireland’s The Trumpet.
‘A most fascinating and assured first collection which deserves re-reading, for like the unexcavated pyramids his work is rich with layers and interwoven meanings’.—Pippa Little for The Ofi Press.
