The Belfast Notebooks

Traces a poet's journey deep into a country where "the wine tastes of jasmine and history" as it evokes layers of violence, memory, and community. Ranging across Northern Ireland through Italy, Spain, Morocco, and back home to Maine, these poems from Jeffrey Thomson's fifth full-length collection engage myth and classical art just as easily as they riff on rock music and street murals. They are raucous and rowdy and love a good pint. Full of the history everyone knows and the legends no one speaks, this book feels at once intimate and sweeping, personal and limitless, written by a citizen of the wounded city where the scar of memory lingers and is healed. Jeffrey Thomson is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.