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You can order Charm for Catching a Train directly from Green Bottle Press


Belfast: No Alibis Bookstore
Belfast/Killowen: Seaside Books

Dublin: Winding Stair Bookshop

Or from Poetry Book Society


Please support independent poetry publishers and bookshops!

'This gregarious, tender pamphlet criss-crosses the Atlantic: in Pennsylvania, a motorist and coachman each “looks up from his century”; in Belfast, the poet searches “for something déjà vu” among the musics and idiosyncrasies of Belfast. These poems are as infused with the cadences of the city and its poets as they are by half a century and more of American history. The Vietnam War – to which the author’s father was a conscientious objector – is here in the genetic code, so too the trauma of Europe’s wars, and the anxieties and terrors of post-9/11 America. Across the continents, among their people, through language luminous and formally controlled, the war poem and the love poem cohabit and, as they must, coalesce.'

 

--Stephen Sexton, author of If All the World and Love Were Young and Cheryl's Destinies  

"Her writing is full of details of daily life, its deliberations, family, food and drink, and its Jewishness. The language sets a generous mood...Past and present are in a state of delicate balance."
~Sally Festing, Sphinx One Point of Interest Reviews


"Williamson's language is gentle and even musical..."
~Poetry Book Society

"The poems in this pamphlet not only a strong sense of place, but a strong sense of the spaces between the places, or perhaps on their way to them..."
~Oberlin Alumni Magazine


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For more about Charm for Catching a Train,
read my feature on poems, process and time in The Honest Ulsterman


or watch me read 'Charm for Catching a Train'
with Poetry Happening as part of Books Ireland

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