The Irish Literary Times

Padraig Rooney was born in Monaghan. He is interested in poems whose idiom is part-Irish, part-something else. ‘The Harmattan’, from his next collection Dust Devils, is a dust devil itself. In this poem the narrator lays his hand on what he assumes to be frost or snow, only to find its the sand of the harmattan (the definition of which is included beneath the title).

Alan Gillis was born in Belfast. His verbal inventiveness lends itself, equally productively, to both urban and rural poems.