Northern Ireland’s Tom Paulin has been publishing since the late 1970s: six books of critical prose, several plays, two anthologies, and ten collections of poetry. However, it has been more than a decade since his last collection of new verse. Now, Namanlagh (shortlisted in the U.K. for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize and the winner of PEN’s 2025 Heaney Prize), has arrived, and in it Paulin, now in his seventy-eighth year, is forthcoming about the trials that have formerly prevented him from writing. Physical frailty and crippling bouts of depression have played their part. As he writes in “A Question”: “Have I at last started to climb out / of the deep pit where I’ve been?
The good news is that, yes, he has, and so in terms of Irish literature, not to mention basic human sympathy, we must be glad for this book, the title of which refers to a lake or lagh in Paulin’s Co. Donegal. There are two prominent settings for the poems, his native Belfast and environs, and Oxford, his home and place of academic work. Peppered throughout these pages are versions of and inspirations from the poetry of Bertolt Brecht and Pierre de Ronsard, as well as Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar—forays into foreign writers that don’t disturb the book’s Anglo-Irish equilibrium, acting instead as ballast for the poet’s more personal ruminations. Knowing well his way around English poetry, Paulin has delved deeply into the river of himself, a running water full of reflection, pulled at times by dangerous currents, existing no longer as it once was.
What Paulin once was, in the late twentieth century, was a fiery, occasionally profanity-laced critic of state authority and sectarianism, both poet and polemicist. Once describing himself as a member of “a dying breed of old middle-class, Protestant, socialist dissenters,” his work was radical, unrelenting, and sometimes vicious. In such collections as A State of Justice (1977) and The Strange Museum (1980), poems cannon-blasted off the page with lines like, “As a free strenuous spirit changes / To a servile defiance that whines and shrieks.” His support of Palestine, his referring to English paratroopers during the 1972 Bloody Sunday as “rotten racist bastards,” his unreluctance to ruffle establishment as well as liberal feathers culminated in 2002 when he described Israel as a “historical obscenity” and described the Israeli army as the “Zionist SS.” There was a massive backlash, including a canceled reading at Harvard.
But what of Namanlagh? Shadows, green, stone-dotted fields, crumbling houses, and cloudy visions populate. Vitriol is noticeably absent. Written often in single stanzas, in light meter without regular rhyme, the poems are gentle, brow-furrowed more than fiery-eyed. There is also, good humorously, a meta-poetry present, a rhetorical self-consciousness admitting his interest in certain birds (the stonechat, the chough) and in ‘behind the scenes’ moments like: “A dirty shirt dropped on the stairs / – dropped from the stars I nearly wrote.” But the deep cries from depression’s center persist, tied to, even summoned by, memories from his service in World War II. “[I]f only some idea / could find its way / through enemy territory / then I’d at last begin / to look up at the sky,” finds tragic echo in the Randall Jarrell-ian “Tail Gunner”: “I count my missions / count all those Lancasters / falling in flames / the little figures seeding from them / – one two three four or none / though seven I counted one time.” Lands of sky and cloud, now representing the potential of something like hope, first were killing gardens, with falling, countable plane flowers and seeds of soldiers destined to propagate death. Presumably, as past and present intertwine, when Paulin writes from inside his illness, “I don’t want my mind to go / but if it should do so / then I want to go out like a light / just as soon as I possibly can,” he wished the same for those ill-fated servicemen.
Is it conceivable, however, that Paulin has, quietly, arrived at some sort of marginal understanding, perhaps even a shade of peace of mind? In “Edge of Town,” the poet finds himself walking past a railroad bridge, beside a “fence of metal railings […] ten twelve yards of ordinary railings” that look like “an infinite funnel […] both real and unreal / like a problem in physics / which doesn’t in fact exist.” As the poet comes face to face with this solidity leaking, as it were, into the metaphysical, he monistically realizes that:
– here the perception of distance
is also the perception of time
as if time could be rubber
like a ball and alter under pressure
as if time is a perspective
that alters with space – so this line
of railings stretches my little universe
to its limits and stymies
us both – though I know both is nonsense.
It’s within poetry’s purview that an elderly man can recognize himself in such metalwork and then connect his own being to the indivisibility of Being. “Both” is nonsense, and Paulin has acquitted himself well with his latest offering. One hopes it is not his last. There is much more matter to investigate.
POETRY
By Tom Paulin
Faber & Faber
Published May 19, 2026
