Kitchen hymns are the songs sung at home, not in the chapel; in vernacular speech, not Latin. The poems in Padraig O Tuama’s new collection are a form of hymnody that arise neither from belief nor devotion. A man asks himself if he believes in God and turns to language rather than the maker of language; an agnostic Jesus meets a curious Persephone at hell’s exit; a mass for the end of the world is offered by some- one more interested in birds than in salvation.

In registers of rage, eros and melody, towards nature, elegy and praise, Kitchen Hymns is a study in form and lyric address: the sights and sounds of a poem; the lungs of the world; skin touching skin; experience. Here are poems of originality and feeling – a provocation to thought, and an invocation of the forces that direct the strange, branching paths of our lives.