Books
Thirty-Six Views of the Sugarloaf
“In Thirty-Six Views of the Sugarloaf, Nell Regan, with an artist’s eye, gives us the familiar Sugarloaf mountain in Co. Wicklow as we have never experienced it before. In poems characterised by the attention, concision and freshness of Japanese poetry, she delves into the geology, archaeology, history and dinnseanchas of our own small, many-named Mount Fuji. The mountain acts as pivot and focus as we meet, among others, the 17th century author of the Down Survey, Samuel Beckett absorbing moonlight, and the children of Curtlestown school hurtling through a first fall of snow. This book is an absolute delight.”
– Moya Cannon
“Inspired by the 19th Century Japanese print master Hokusai’s “36 Views of Mt Fuji”, Regan’s collection was begun as a collaboration with print maker Cathy Henderson, who lost her life and who became a strong presence in these astonishing poems. With the quicksilver intensity of the haiku, the shapes of the poems on the page have their own corporeality, turning the material of life—the death of a dear friend, miscarriage, a new home, love—into linguistic prints that are moving and brilliant. It is a celebration of the natural world and a praise for life in all its moments.”
– Carmen Bugan
A Gap in the Clouds
Compiled around 1235, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, or Ogura’s 100 Poems by 100 Poets, is one of the most important collections of poetry in Japan.
Though the poets include emperors and empresses, courtiers and high priests, ladies-in-waiting and soldier-calligraphers, the collection is far more than a fascinating historical document.
This new translation, entitled A Gap in the Clouds, is the first to be published in Ireland. As the translators note in their Introduction, “these beautiful poems have endured because their themes are universal and readily understood by contemporary readers”.
Published on 11 February, 2021, to mark Japan’s National Foundation Day.
“Poet and translator have done a highly impressive job, working through the undergrowth and the overgrowth of the Japanese Tanka, the short poems that comprise the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu”
Paddy Kehoe, RTÉ
“All the poems read in a fresh and lively way. […] and is a welcome addition to the wonders of the world of Japanese classical poetry”
Leanne Ogasawara, Asian Review of Books
“these delightful translations reveal millennium old voices still fresh and full of yearning”
Martina Evans, Irish Times
Helena Molony: A Radical Life, 1883-1967
A groundbreaking biography of Helena Molony, campaigning journalist, Abbey actor, 1916 veteran, trade unionist and dissenter that was chosen as an Irish Independent Book of the Year, 2017.
Helena Molony is one of the most fascinating activists in the twentieth century Irish history and also one of the most elusive, so this first biography Helena Molony: A Radical Life 1883-1967 is timely. Biographer Nell Regan, who pioneered research on Molony, sheds light not only on Molony but on the many causes and characters she worked with during her long public career.
‘Helena Molony was one of the most important female activists of the Irish revolutionary era yet she has never been the subject of a major biographical study until now. Nell Regan’s book more than makes up for past neglect’.
Padraig Yeates
“Helena Molony was one of the most important female activists of the Irish revolutionary era yet she has never been the subject of a major biographical study until now. Nell Regan’s book more than makes up for past neglect”
Padraig Yeates
“an honest and enlightening depiction of a remarkable – and radical – Irish life’s”
Senia Pašeta
“This first biography of Molony fleshes out our knowledge of this complicated woman and joins a number of other biographies of women activists during these years whose lives are being excavated by a new generation of historians of Irish women.”
Catriona Crowe, Irish Times
“This important book tells the extraordinary tale of a true-life Wonder Woman who popped up again and again at pivotal points in the making of modern Ireland, a sort of Zelig with a cause. Biographer Nell Regan has done a major service by piecing together the jigsaw of a dazzling life that featured more Byzantine twists and turns than that Hollywood bamboozler The Usual Suspects.”
Damien Corless, Irish Independent
One Still Thing
Throughout One Still Thing, Nell Regan’s third collection, changes in the material properties of glass, stone, tree and rain parallel changes in the human body through illness, vocation and fertility.
Opening in urban and rural landscapes, the first part builds to the sequence ‘Thirty-six Views of the Sugarloaf’, prompted by Hokusai’s woodcuts. At the centre of the book is Passage, the story of the migration of an early 20th century Irish woman. From the vaults of the Federal Gold Reserve to a shell factory in Iowa, tragic conflicts of work, love and fate take place.
The final section is formed by a series of love poems which celebrate a new relationship and turn on possible imagined futures.
“Nell Regan’s One Still Thing, is a collection of emotional complexity.
Her lyrics are all sound-dominant, even where they are dissonant, for example: ‘every / note, whoop and noise rattles’ (A Composer Walks the Catacombs), it’s a pleasure to hear the fluid music of vowels and consonants:
Horizon tricks the eye, a sea–
long gone – is sighted. A fossil
lightly shifts, remembers tide.
(Santa Fe)
This habit of looking both in the far distance and microscopically, of shifting viewpoint, is a characteristic.
‘Passage’, a sequence of epistolary poems addressed by an emigrant to her sister, begins with a sea-passage. Like Martina Evans, Regan is adept at portraying character.
In this, her third collection, Nell Regan has captured a resonant moment in history and allowed the stories of unknown individuals to flow around her own, creating an emotional connection across time and space. The recurring bridge is a perfect metaphor for a beautifully distilled collection.”
Afric McGlinchey, Poetry Ireland Review
Bound For Home
Nell Regan and Monica Boyle’s commissioned project for Fort Camden mines the rich seam of history, heritage and legacy of this coastal artillery fort, the structure itself, the story of its construction and subsequent abandonment and decay and the lives of the people who lived and worked there.
Ann Davoreen, Dir West Cork Arts Centre, Skibereen
These new poems by Nell Regan arose from her sojourn and continuous visits to Fort Camden near Crosshaven. Her fantasia on tree rings, ‘Tree’ is a …a poetic mapping of the passage of time through an intervention of interjection of trees, bearing with ‘the endless sniping/ of the natives – the ash, the oak, the yew’ while honouring events in history as they become layered over time. Regan has collated the incidents through poems, extracting from the bark of hundreds of documents and artefacts the blood of all who died and all who want away;. The blood of generations flows through this work, until the whole beautiful battlement and officer’s mess of memory is left for us to dine upon: ‘silverware polished and linen pressed’.
Thomas McCarthy
“…an extraordinary achievement, in terms of both insight and discipline … Through these poems the incidents of Camden life become art, the stones stand up and speak to us.”
Thomas McCarthy
“I say this with awe… the funniest poetry one could imagine coming from a disused barracks in Co Cork…”
Greg Londe, Glucksman House, New York University
“Bound for Home was a lovely surprise that rounded out my 2011 poetry reading experience. Boyle and Regan are well suited as collaborators; both combine deeply considered themes with a sense of humour and joyful discovery. [Regan’s] work… takes an…. interesting approach, using a variety of forms and sources of inspiration. The excellent opening poem ‘Tree’ gives voice to the rings of a Monterey Cypress which was planted in the middle of the fort, bringing us through over 150 years of history with sharp, haiku-like three line stanzas. ‘Ring No. 62’ places us in 1916, when:
News from afar floats on the breeze,
the seagulls talk of rebellion,
the jackdaws consider little else.
Jennifer Matthews, Southword
Preparing for Spring
A stingingly clear outdoor light illuminates Nell Regan’s poems. She offers her readers the sweet shock of immediacy: of the ‘glimmer of white butterflies’, of the worn pieces of glass on the sea’s edge, ‘muting clear to milky white, of the smell of fresh copybooks or empty tea-chests, of the ‘sweet rasp’ of sound. Such moments of perception are not decoration, they clarify a lived life. Here are poems which explore trauma, the fissures that open up between the present and the past, the ‘black hole’ in memory. Her vision is precise and forgiving: the ways in which the past lives on intersects with the sudden turns of the present, the freshness of landscape and urban streetscape.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Glen Dimplex New Writing Awards, the Strong First Collection Awards and the Vincent Buckely Awards.
“Poems of a rare lyric beauty.”
Judges remarks, Patrick Kavanagh Awards
“A very fine debut collection… of great sophistication and tact”
Paul Perry, Irish Times
“Nell Regan’s debut collection, Preparing for Spring, is an accomplished book which will delighted both those readers who have already admired her work in magazines and those to whom her voice is new.”
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin