Carcanet online book launch: Father’s Father’s Father by Dane Holt

We’re looking forward to the launch of Dane Holt’s debut poetry collection Father’s Father’s Father, just published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2025.

Dane Holt’s debut pamphlet, Many Professional Wrestlers Never Retire, was published in 2023 by Lifeboat Press and it was a Poetry Book Society Autumn Pamphlet Choice. In 2019, he won the inaugural Brotherton Prize, awarded by the University of Leeds. He holds a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast and was the 2023 Ciaran Carson Publishing Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Belfast.

Here’s the book blurb: Dane Holt’s subject is often the aftermath of tragedy – ecological, personal or social – but these poems grieve in surprising ways. Deflection, displacement and refracted voices combine to animate a world of brilliantly realised situations. And Holt’s characters, though always articulate, do not precisely comprehend their own relation to what they inherit. Compelling, funny, endlessly inventive, this bold debut collection explores the formation and disillusion of masculinity and community, exposing just how tender and brittle these constructs are.

Forward Prize-winning poet Nick Laird said of the collection: ‘In Dane Holt’s Father’s Father’s Father there are delicate parables, surreal narrations, moving and direct lyrics, and cameos from unexpected quarters (Tammy Wynette? John Cena?), but wherever the poems go, the tone is convincing, the line controlled, and a lovely obliquity pushes against the emotional pressure. It’s a wonderfully inventive and auspicious debut.’

And, as a treat, here’s a poem – ‘Blue Suit At The Survival Seminar’ – from the book:

Don’t outswim the shark.
Outswim your sister.
Approach failure

not as an avenue
but a roundabout.
Fashion your own exits.

This being said,
keep an eye on your tongue—
that sidekick wriggling in its suit.

Prepare to cut ties the second
prior to the second
it becomes more trouble

than it’s worth. When
they offer a suitcase
to fold yourself into,

aim for open water.
Winter in the shadows
of a new town. Dream

a fresh pitch, shed
your previous skin.
If in doubt,

consult the weathervane
of your instinct. Approach risk
with the carnival’s patience.

And remember: Never
spread news
the way news spreading spreads.

The reading will be hosted by Caroline Bird, who has seven volumes published by Carcanet – her Selected Poems, Rookie, was published in 2022, and her sixth, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyles Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics. In 2023, she won a Cholmondeley Award.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event. See our write-up of the Spring 2025 PN Review reading event – also from Carcanet – here.