Things That Happen

For 25 years Maurice Scully’s work was devoted to a single vast project under the overall title of Things That Happen, which consists of 5 Freedoms of Movement, Livelihood, Sonata, and Tig, the coda to the whole work. This volume brings together the entire project under one set of covers for the first time, and thoroughly revised at the same time, and is published siumultanesouly with a volume of essays on the author's work.

‘[Things That Happen] is the most ambitious and important long poem in modern Irish literature.’ — Eric Falci

“While poets like William Carlos Williams once announced that anything was available for the subject of the poem, Scully turns the paradigm on its head. The poem becomes less about subject matter, or what the poem is “about”, and more an occasion or experience in itself …. It is a poetry that is playful, irreverent, skittish, rhapsodic and paratactic all at the same time.” — Paul Perry, The Stinging Fly

“[Scully’s] innovations … take a modernist inheritance, strip it of any residual mythos, and use it to examine the interaction of the writer’s reflecting mind with the daily life of everybody … and truly, if one seeks a poetry of the moment that records and wryly critiques the inequities of modern life, Maurice Scully’s is it.” — Marthine Satris