Grub

Darkly comic, brilliantly allusive, elegiac - Martin Mooney's Grub marks the debut of an inventive and highly charged imagination. Dealing with political hypocrisy, the nature of creativity and love, his poems form a series of hard-edged satirical parables exploring an eclectic range of subject matter, including Anna Akhmatova's funeral, the Belfast shipyards, body piercing and poll tax evasion.

Weaving a magical realist fable of a young Irish expatriate adrift in Thatcherite London, Grub's title sequence - with its cast of corrupt policemen, malevolent ghosts and a rapidly disintegrating band of punks and down-and-outs - draws together elements as disparate as the Marchioness disaster and the murder of Roberto Calvi to create a powerful narrative constantly underpinned by 'the spiky friction of the fantastic and the everyday'.