Savage Tales

Winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2024

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2023

Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2023



Tara Bergin's third collection, Savage Tales continues to explore original territory, bringing the riddle, song and dialogue into a series of formally inventive and blackly comic sequences. Bergin's book asks us to steer our way through a chorus of exchanges and situations, as she charts the fraught course between the making of individual poems and, uneasy bedfellow of this sustained activity, an authority which is always here called into question. Dramatizing the contemporary and the classic with great wit, ingenuity and panache, Savage Tales confirms Bergin as one of the outstanding poets of our time.