Gub

Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2025

Gub is unlike anything I have ever read. In a playful demotic that is exhilarating, hilarious and never forced, Scott McKendry makes magic of a Belfast that in other hands would make grim reading. The most exciting poet to come out of the north of Ireland in many years.' - Louise Kennedy, author of Tresspasses

'There is nothing else like this in Irish poetry. A lyrical savant of the highest level, and one of the most exciting writers in Ireland today, McKendry is utterly his own beast.' - Michael Nolan, author of Close To Home

'A distinctive and energetic voice' - Sunday Times Ireland

'McKendry is a joyful liar, a storyteller... McKendry writes "life's not synonymous with pain" and it's this sense, of a kind of all-encompassing appetite, that marks him out as fine company.' - Declan Ryan

Demons, geese, The Laughing Cow, marching bands, LSD and pistols smuggled home from the USSR. You'll find all these in Scott McKendry's Gub.

Rooted in the language of working-class Belfast, and slipping between eras and time zones, closing the gap between the real and the fantastical, the academic and the everyday, the parish and the polis, McKendry's exhilarating debut collection comes to terms with generational trauma, social decay and the rituals of a place with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

Invoking the balaclava'd gunmen, urban warlords and explosions which gripped the decades either side of the Good Friday Agreement, Gub drags the language of ghettoised Belfast into serious Irish poetry. Wearing the lyrical influences of his 'ugly city' lightly - Carson, McGuckian, Longley - McKendry's tightly-wrought structures weave an unprecedented verse of mourning, witness, alter ego, class alienation and aesthetic turmoil.

Noisy, dark and witty, Gub is an utterly new voice out of Belfast, but one posting bulletins across inner-city neighbourhoods everywhere.