Join us for the launch of Andrew Fitzsimons’s collection of poetry, My Father The Dog . With opening remarks from Alan Gilsenan.
My Father The Dog is a haunting sequence of haiku inspired by real killings in an isolated mountain village in Japan. After decades working in the city, a man returns to his childhood home to care for his parents and their small farm. When they die, grief, rural isolation, and mounting tensions with neighbours lead to his slow unravelling: a threatening haiku posted on a shed wall, the adoption of two dogs, and the growing belief that one dog is the reincarnation of his father.
Structured in three sections echoing the three lines of a haiku, the book moves from the man’s troubled homecoming to the aftermath of the killings, and finally to the fugitive’s hallucinatory experience hiding in the forest awaiting capture. By placing extreme violence within a form associated with restraint and natural beauty, My Father The Dog creates a disturbing formal tension, producing a work that is spare, precise, and deeply unsettling.
All are welcome and refreshments will be served.
Attendance is free but booking is essential.
ABOUT
Andrew Fitzsimons was born in Dublin, and is a poet, translator and academic. He has published three volumes of poetry, What the Sky Arranges (2013), A Fire in the Head (2014). And, The Sunken Keep (2017), all from Isobar Press. His translation Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō was published by the University of California Press in 2022. It received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Work of Literary Translation (Honorable Mention) from the MLA in 2023. His study of Thomas Kinsella, The Sea of Disappointment , was published by UCD Press (2008), and he edited Thomas Kinsella: Prose Occasions 1951-2006 (Carcanet, 2009). He is a Professor of English at Gakushuin University, Tokyo.