Savage Acres

The poems of Irish poet Keith Payne's Savage Acres explore the pivotal role of housing and, by extension, community in our lives. Keith Payne revisits the new urban estates of Ireland's capital city - his own formative playing fields - and their once marginalised and neglected inhabitants who, in time, would become central to the story of the city's imaginative resistance and cultural rebirth.

Keith Payne is the author of ten collections of poetry in translation and original poetry, most recently Building the Boat (2023), as featured on BBC Radio 3's The Essay, and Whales and Whales, from the Galician of Luisa Castro (2024). He was awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary in 2022 and has held numerous Writer-in-Residence positions, including as Cork City Library Eco Poet in Residence 2022-23. Dividing his time between Ireland and Galicia, he is the founder and curator of the Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill Poetry Exchange Ireland/Galicia.

"[A]t once a salute to the life of a single housing estate, and an excavation of the individual lives it contains..."-Mary O'Malley

"Savage Acres is a terrain, a place of flow, where everyday things lead to unexpected moments of the sublime. Every page contains brilliance and life.' -Adrian Duncan